Independence Day

4th of July, grass is looking good and the lambs are growing very well.


The saying in Paonia is if Mt. Lamborn has snow on the 4th of July it's a good water year. This is a very good year, our cold spring and heavy snow means plenty of irrigation water for later this summer.

Early Morning Rams

Early Morning out checking the feed in the ram pasture.

Surprise Lamb, Bull! Wooly Lawnmowers

Today started out rather interesting. We had planned to make a trip to Grand Junction to do the in between batches fo lambs shopping but had to change our plans.

First we had a surprise late lamb. 9 pounds 9 ounces and doing fine. Mom had him up dry and nursed when we found them. I didn't take any pictures because the next bit of excitement was this bull.


He had smashed down the wire fence in the back corner. We got him back out the gate and with the cows and called the owner to tell him about the problem. This is the same owner whose cattle break into the hay field every single year. We explained that he'd be getting a bill for the fence repair and replacement wire as soon as we got it done. Colorado is an open range state but if you have a legal fence in place and an animal breaks it down you can get it repaired by the livestock owner.

Since the shopping trip was kaput we decided to do the Friday scheduled work today instead. Main task was getting the lawnmowers working around the main house lawn.



We have to use jug panels to keep them off the porch or we'd have sheep into the house if they could manage it.

One Less Coyote and Grazing Ewes

We finally were able to get a clear safe shot on the coyote that's been hanging around. Generally we try to leave the coyotes alone. If they respect the fences and dogs and don't bother us or the sheep we don't bother them. The last time we had to kill one was in the fall of 2000. After that the pack moved on or changed composition and we had a number of years with no problems. We could hear coyotes nearly every night and there is a den on our property. But the coyotes never came in near the sheep, never tried to lure the dogs away from the flock and never caused us any problems. They left us alone and we in turn left them alone.

This coyote was different. I suspect the older animals died and the new ones that moved in were much bolder and more aggressive. This male was ignoring the dogs and being way too bold, coming up and checking out things during the day and looking in at the sheep and ignoring the frenzied dogs just inside the fence. With lambing about to start we cannot afford to have a coyote like this in the area. We've been trying to get a good shot at it but until today they were all unsafe shots. The coyote finally got into a position where we could take the shot. 1 round : 1 less coyote. Hopefully this will be the last of the problem for another decade.


The pregnant ewes are finally out on pasture and ready to lamb.

Rebuilding the Sheep Sweep - Ewes on Pasture

We've had some problems with the sheep sweep over the years. The sheep have worn a path down the middle and the panels have sunk into the ground. This year we decided to put some gravel down on top of weed block and then use old mine belt to make a more durable surface.


Adding gravel to the sweep area.


More Gravel

We also got the ewes out on some pasture. We still have to do their spring dewormer but this pasture can be grazed before that. The main lambing pastures in the orchard are still too short with not enough grass for the sheep to go there so we started them in the front.





Lots of Happy Sheep!

Yoda the Sheep and Pasture

Yoda looking particularly majestic. He's doing well for an old sheep.


We have some sheep on the front pear orchard pasture.

Rams on Pasture

Now that the hay is in we can put the rams out on the front pear orchard pasture to clean up the parts we cannot cut.


This is the first time that all the sheep are out on pasture at the same time. We have one ewe who is sick in a small pen and a ewe and lamb training the puppy who are in but I don't think those really count.

Mowing the Orchard

Moved the pregnant ewes and mowed their old pen to reset the grass growth. We needed to chop off the seed heads and get it back to growing more leaves. It should be ready to graze again in 2-3 weeks.

On Pasture and Big Bales of Hay

Today we got the pregnant ewes out into pastures where they can lamb. The grass is still not very high so we put out some hay.

We got 3 round bales to try. These are smaller than some, only 4 feet wide and about 1000 pounds each. Ken can move them with the tractor without a bale spike but it's not a long term solution.

I wanted to see how it unrolled out and we managed to unroll it by hand without too much difficulty. Then we let the sheep in and they seem to be happy to be out of the winter corrals and enjoying the alfalfa in the hay as a treat.

We are now officially within the lambing period. I expect them to really get started in a couple more days with next week being the big lambalanch period.

Lawnmowers

Snow has melted and things dried out enough to get the pregnant ewes out and give them their spring dewormer. Afterwards as a treat they got to be lawnmowers around the guest house and shop.


I sat out under the shop porch and read the mail and watched. They spent a lot of time wandering around and often they get into trouble so someone needs to be there when they are out in that area.


They certainly enjoyed the fresh grass. My tulips are up but not flowering. They left the tulip leaves alone. Last year they ate the flowers so once I've got buds I don't think they can be out in this area.

They go out on the main pastures this week. Lambing technically due as early as 22 April but more likely 27 April.

Guard Dog

Winnie in the pen with some of her sheep. She is now guarding the adult rams who have not only their winter pen but the entire west side of the orchard to run in. We are hoping they will clean up the ground fall apples.

Sheep on Pasture

We sorted out the next batch of butcher sheep and for the first time ever they have the entire front pear orchard pasture to graze in. There are cockleburrs so we didn't want to let the main flock out there but these sheep are going to slaughter in a couple of weeks so the wool doesn't really matter. We still lock them up at night as the area is big and with only Kimball to patrol it we wanted to be sure they were ok. It is nice to see sheep in the whole field though.

Sheep and Chickens

The spare sheep has settled right in. He hardly even moves now when we go outside. He is eating the hay for the horses and donkey and we've had to move sheep away from where he is. I sure wish he'd head on out to somewhere else.
The new batch of chickens is growing well too. They are now off the main newspaper litter and on pine shavings. We still put the food and water on paper. Four have died but the rest are doing well.
Meanwhile it's time to put the adult rams and the ram lambs together into one big ram bunch. We sorted out one old ram who will go to slaughter at the end of this month and 2 who are sold and will travel together to their new place in a couple of weeks. The rest of the rams, all 27 of them, are now crammed in together in the mixing pen. We start out with a bunch of hay bales in the pen and the feeders full. It's small enough that if they all lay down at once they cover the floor with sheep. The idea is not to let them get a big enough space to be able to run and bash each other too much. By the time the hay bales are gone they are getting better. We slowly open up the pen giving them more and more space until in a couple of weeks they are now one big ram bunch. It takes a while to get them to sort out who's boss but this has worked for us for several years and seems to be the best way to integrate the youngsters with the old boys.
The ewes, lambs and replacement ewes are now all in one bunch grazing. Pastures are doing well and the lambs are growing well. We should be getting 30 days weights this week and we'll see how they are doing then but just looking at them most are looking very good.

Wooly Lawnmowers

Why dig out the string trimmer when you have sheep?

After all, that's what makes a great lawn, sheep grazing on it. So we fenced off the front of the house for the sheep. We did have to put some jug panels up on the stairs to prevent sheep from coming up onto the porch and making themselves at home. I figure we've got about a week of grazing here for the 32 yearlings and wethers. They like to run under the porch, at least until I walk on top and then sheep come exploding out from under it. They are enjoying the fresh grass.

On Pasture

The pregnant ewes got out on pasture today. As you can see the grass is thin, so we pre-loaded hay into the pasture and some ewes were eating it after testing the grasses.

From the looks of these udders, this is a typical one, it's none too soon. I expect lambs anytime now.

Sheep Dewormer

The pregnant ewes got their dewormer yesterday. One of the ways we reduce the parasite load in the pastures is to be sure to deworm the ewes 24-48 hours before they go out for the summer. That combined with our hard winters mean that we rarely have to deworm lambs until late summer when we start getting nose bot problems. So yesterday was a run through of all the pregnant girls into the sweep for a dose of dewormer. They all thought they were going to the pasture and were eager to get out. We had a lot of irate sheep when they had to go back to dry hay for breakfast.

We are still really short of grass. The long exceptionally cold winter means our pastures are running several weeks behind in grass growth so the yearlings and rams will all stay in winter corrals until the pastures catch up. We need to get the lambing ewes out before they start popping. It's much more sanitary to lamb on pasture.

The official due date is tomorrow.

Major Milestone

The farm had a major milestone today. This old travel trailer has been here for at least 10 years. It was used as a temporary guest house on occasion and Oogie stayed in it when she first got here in the fall of 2000 with the sheep. It was not in great shape, wasps had started to build nests and we had no use for it.

We thought about selling it but that seemed like a lot of trouble. The effort to sell it or make it road worthy was just too much. So we just left it. Last week in the local paper was an ad for a person wanting an old used travel trailer to make into an eggmobile for chickens on pasture. This seemed like a perfect recycling use to us. So today the trailer has been given away and moved off the property to go be turned into a portable laying house for chickens.

I hope it makes a great place for the chickens to lay tasty true free ranged eggs and be protected by predators at night.

Lawnmowers

We got the ewe yearlings out to graze the little bits of grass coming up around the guest house. Why get out a lawnmower when you have sheep! But the grass must be too young still, it doesn't taste good yet and they didn't like it. They did have a wonderful time racing all over and checking out the shop porch but we need some more sun for the grass to get sweet enough that it's fit food for sheep.

Of course with real grazing going to happen soon it was time to get out all the electric nets that had been stored for the winter in the barn and make sure they were all ok. We really should check them before we put them in storage but somehow we never manage to get it done. So the first task of the grazing year is to check all the nets and repair any broken wires. We already checked the fence chargers and batteries and they are ok. So here we are stretching out each net and inspecting it. Ken repairs any broken bits with hot melt glue and wire as needed. We got all the stored nets checked and repaired. The only ones we did not check are the ones being used to keep the dogs in. We'll check those and repair them when we move the dogs around for grazing guard duty.

Back on Pasture and Why Labels are Misleading

The early snow has pretty much all melted and we got one batch of ram lambs back out on our triticale pasture regrowth. We made sure they were all pretty full with hay before putting them out and made an aisle of electric fence to prevent too much pugging of the permanent pastures. We'll bring them back in to the corrals at night to reduce predator pressure. Our plan is to replant this to permanent pasture in the spring so any pugging that happens now won't matter and I'd rather the feed go into sheep rather than be wasted.

This brought up an interesting dilemma regarding labeling of food products. I've already explained why I consider USDA Organic regulations to be cruel and inhumane for livestock. However, there are other labels that we might qualify for that we have so far not used. Terms like free-range, cage free, no hormones, vegetarian diet and the like are all potential ways to describe our products.

Grass-fed has up until now not been regulated by the federal government. That has changed and there is now a new Federal grass-fed standard. I'll talk a bit more about it in a later entry.

The American Grassfed Association has developed a very strict interpretation of grassfed that limits feeding of stored forages and use of winter corrals. It's a nice idea but we'll never qualify. The sticking points for us are "All livestock produced under this standard must be on range, pasture, or in paddocks for their entire lives. This means that all animals must be maintained at all times on land with at least 80% forage cover or unbroken ground." and "AGA grassfed ruminant animals cannot be fed stock-piled forages in confinement for more than 30 days per calendar year. "

The limit of 30 days confined feeding is not necessarily enough to protect our pastures from severe pugging and erosion in wet, muddy times. Our attempts at feeding hay on our pastures resulted in destruction of the pasture in that area for a year or more. Our heavy clay soils are the most likely culprit in the problems and compaction we experienced. The people I know who are successfully meeting those restrictions either have sandy soils or have large areas they can plow for annual crops and so use those for their feeding of stored forage on pasture to meet the no confinement requirement. I had hoped to be able to do this on our farm with a multi-year rotation that would include brassicas and small grains like oats and triticale as pasture for our sheep. In addition to providing feed during our summer slump it was also going to help extend the grazing season into fall and provide a way to feed hay on pasture in winter reducing VM contamination of our wool.

Unfortunately we learned by trial and error that plowing our fields only plows up a new crop of rocks. We've been talking to people who have tried no-till but so far everyone has said that nothing they've tried works in our soils with our huge rocks. The giant rock walls that ring our pastures haven't really made a dent in the rock component of our soil. There is a reason that our mesa has always been planted to perennial crops like fruit trees, hay or more recently wine grapes. So we use our winter corrals as places to put sheep when the pastures are too wet or muddy to safely graze and use stored hay forage as needed when pastures are dry or not growing. Now if we sold primarily lambs we could get them to qualify as from birth to harvest they would meet all those restrictions. But our primary product is mutton, an older sheep that for us is usually 18-36 months old and has experienced at least one winter here. Many of our butcher animals are old ewes or rams who have performed other jobs for us and now go on to their final and in many ways most important job, providing tasty mutton for our customers and ourselves.

The new federal grass-fed standard requires that animals get 99% of their feed from pasture or hay and that they are on pasture from the time of the last frost in spring until the first frost in fall. So what does it mean when we pulled sheep off before first frost because the pastures were too wet, and yet now after a major frost have some back out on pasture? I would maintain that long term sustainability means we take good care of our land so that it continues to be productive for generations. A rigid standard that ignores individual farm conditions seems counterproductive. Certainly other farms in our valley can plow regularly and can plant crops without encountering huge rocks. But those farms are on the other side of the valley, not here. Yet our farm is highly productive when I work with the soils growing permanent crops with only very rare plowing. Shouldn't labels designed to promote healthy food and better land stewardship be flexible enough to account for what's best for an individual farm?

What about other labels like free range or cage free for poultry and no hormones or antibiotics?

Free range is federally controlled. The definition of free range for poultry is that the birds must have "access to the outside" No indication of for how long, or how much and certainly no real requirement that they be outside once they are done brooding. And since the time from the end of the brooding period until the time to slaughter for most commercial broilers is so short even if they were outside they won't get very much time there. In short, many birds can be labeled free range when all that it was was an open door at the end of a broiler house for the last week or so of their lives. Since free range doesn't mean what people think it means we have generally avoided it unless we qualify it by explaining that our birds are "really free ranged" and explain the legal defintion plus what we do. We have picked a slower growing commercial cross that we don't butcher until 14-16 weeks of age. Our chickens are outside during the day but penned at night for predator control. When outside they are free to get into everything and do. Our birds range freely over the farm eating all sorts of stuff.

Cage free only means no cages. Most birds are now raised cage free. But they are still in indoor confinement sheds with thousands of birds. Cage free does not mean outside access. So be aware when you purchase eggs or meat from "cage free" birds.

Vegetarian diet is another one that is commonly used. For ruminants like our sheep a vegetarian diet is the natural diet. Geese too are almost exclusively vegetarians and will only rarely eat insects. But what about chickens or ducks? One of the best fly controls is to have chickens range behind the grazing ruminants and scratch and eat the fly larvae and adult flies on a regular basis. Ducks can be important in preventing liver fluke infections by eating the snails that are an intermediate host. Using these natural parasite controls only makes sense but doing so means those birds can no longer be said to be raised on a vegetarian diet. Yet vegetarian diet is promoted as natural for chickens when it isn't really their preferred way to eat.

No added hormones is a difficult one as well. It is illegal to add hormones to poultry or pig feeds or to give them any so a no added hormones label on either pork or any poultry is irrelevant. Yet it does make sense for ruminants like cattle and sheep. Dairy animals are the ones most commonly given additional hormones and many people prefer to avoid them. So whether the label is meaningful depends on species. For the record we do not give our sheep hormones except when used to bring them into heat for artificial insemination, a procedure we use very rarely and so far only with imported semen from UK rams.

What about no antibiotics? Poultry is routinely given antibiotics in the feed from birth to death. Pigs too are often given low levels of antibiotics in the feed. They are also used in ruminant feeds. All of these applications are potential problems. While they do increase weight gains, and therefore farm income it's certainly not in the best interests of the animals or the consumer to eat constant low levels of antibiotics. Yet if an animal is injured or sick antibiotics are a necessary part of humane care. For us here is a recent example. One of our ewes, Ann, got severely injured. We found her with the inside of one front leg with no skin from the knee up to her elbow. The missing skin area was as if someone had skinned her leg. She was put in a small pen and the injury bandaged. There was no skin to put over the wound, it was gone, so as a precaution she was on a course of injected antibiotics for 10 days with pain medication as required to keep her comfortable. We also used an antibiotic and antifungal ointment on the wound at each dressing change to prevent any problems. She is making a full recovery, there is no nerve damage and there is good scar tissue over the whole area. We fully expect her to be fine in another couple of months. She raised two lovely lambs for us and is a wonderful young ewe that is worth the extra effort and care. However she will eventually be a slaughter animal. We hope it will be many years but there is always the chance she will do something that puts her on the butcher list, fails to care for a lamb, starts eating trees, causes a significant problem with her behavior or the final cause, getting so old that she has lost too many teeth to be able to eat. When that happens she wil be put on the trailer to be processed into mutton for our customers or ourselves. Should we prevent her from ever fulfilling her final job due to an injury and succesful treatment years earlier? By all the rules of all the various labels she could never be used for meat due to the antibiotic use while treating her injury.

The bottom line for us is that we want our customers to ask questions and talk to us about how we produce and care for our animals. We automatically double the federal slaughter withdrawal from any drug, dewormer or vaccine we use but we will always provide the best and most humane care we can for our precious sheep. But we are unlikely to promote federally regulated labels unless there is no way we would ever have to compromise those standards. For us the higher goal is long term sustainable food production given the limits and challenges of our particular farm, soils and climate.

Nitrates and Grazing

Typical farming news.... We had planted oats in a new pasture to provide some grazing during the summer slump and then again in early fall for our sheep. We always do testing on all our forages to balance the custom minerals we give our sheep so before grazing the pasture I take a sample and send it off for analysis. Because small grains can produce high nitrates we get that tested as well. Our June testing revealed that our oats pasture was high in nitrates, high enough to require us to feed the sheep hay in pens at night and only let them graze about half time. This was ok but not ideal. We checked with extension and other folks and were told that we should wait and re-test before grazing it again. Nitrate levels often go down with time and perhaps the plants were just stressed from our hot summer and would recover. We are now at the time when we need to be grazing that field so I sent off another sample for testing. Well the tests came back, the nitrates are so high now that we can't graze it at all. With 200 sheep to feed we had really planned on having that oats as finishing feed for our lambs and flushing feed for the ewes. Now we probably won't be feeding it at all. It's going to be very expensive green manure! We are still debating what to do but it looks like we'll plow it all down this fall and try to get the permanent pasture planted on that area. And I've got to go find more hay as we'll be starting winter hay feeding about a month earlier than expected. At least we did the test and didn't discover this by finding dead sheep in the field.