Breeding Out of Season and Farm Tours

This year we are doing something different for the first time in regards to breeding. Or at least it is my first time. Farm Girl has done this procedure many times at work. We are attempting to breed our ewes out of season with the use of CIDR's and PMSG. We've bred ewes out of season before with our Katahdin flock but they are year round breeders so didn't require any help. This flock however, are a commercial flock and though several are crossed with Dorset or are pure Dorset, which are also known for their prolific lambing and out of season breeding, we decided it was best to CIDR them all.

What is CIDRing you ask? Good question. Before Farm Girl started working at her job, I had never heard of it before myself. It stands for Controlled Intravaginal Drug Release. Basically, it is the process of withholding a ewe's heat cycle in order to synchronize estrus cycles in the entire flock. Hence, we will have lambing over a day or two as opposed to weeks or months.

First step is to corral the flock and send them through a chute where they get inserted with a T-shaped plug that kind of reminds me of a tampon.

As we don't have any proper handling equipment, we had to fashion something out of materials we did have.

It worked decent enough but I was left to herd them forward from the behind, which most of them didn't appreciate. Farm Girl was up front and in charge of inserting the CIDR's while Farm Boy handled the release gate.

After inserting a select group of 8 ewes we waited 12 days and then pulled the CIDR's out before injecting them with PMSG which is an injection to help stimulate the ovaries and fertilization and (hopefully) produce more multiple births. We introduced the ram 24 hours later and then repeated the procedure again the next day with another 8 ewes per ram, and then once again the day after that until all ewes were impregnated. By doing this, we are giving the ram less ewes to have to work with and a chance to rest in between each breeding. We fastened a breeding harness on the rams and then left him in with the ewes for a week.

Marked butts indicate he had serviced them.

Now it is just a waiting game. They say that the best you can hope for in an off-season breeding schedule is a 75% success rate. That was news to me. Disappointing news. I have the year all planned out and budgeted for, and a 75% lamb crop at the end of the year was not in the plans.

Sometimes I get overwhelmed or discouraged and think about throwing in the towel. Thankfully, Farm Girl prevents me from following through with that. I know it takes time and perseverance but I allow the stress of it all to take over. Then I hear someone's farm story and their personal struggles to make their farms afloat, and I feel ashamed of myself. Such as this weekend. Me and the kids toured three sheep farms over the weekend and one of the farmers told how he had started out with 200 ewes which after a couple years, he lost them all to scrapie. That is the kind of thing that would make me throw in the towel and call it quit. But not this farmer, he persevered and started over with 75 healthy ewe lambs. It's stories like that which make me hang in and keep on going.

As it turned out, his farm was my favorite farm on the tour. He didn't have top notch equipment or
the state-of-the-art facility but he was so well-organized. I loved it. Probably because I feel so swamped and unorganized that his place looked so appealing.

The sheep were kept in the bottom of the old bank barn with an extension built on to the back.

Where most farms use the upstairs of a bank barn to house hay and straw, this farmer utilized the space and put the nursery and replacement lambs up there.

Replacement ewes

The nursery

Charts and clipboards make recording handy and easy

Everything is labeled and packaged. Even the extension cords!

The next farm we toured reminded us of our own farm setup and the potential it could have. Their new barn was directly behind the old bank barn such as our arena is located from our bank barn.

Theirs...

...Ours

The thing I got most excited about on this farm was this...

Do you have any idea how much hauling this elevator could save? Brilliant!

Farm Girl thought it was embarrassing when I took photos of everyone's manure piles.

But it made me feel better about my own big pile of shit. However, I am happy to update on that topic that a nearby farmer has gladly been helping himself to my manure and the pile is coming down considerably.

Just comparing these photos after uploading, I feel a ton of satisfaction.

Manure

I hear ya Dr. Malcolm. I've been saying the same thing the last couple days.

This is a side to farming I don't often talk about. It must be the city girl in me but I find it disgusting and vulgar and if I could, I'd find a way to bury it underground and out of sight. But alas, animal feces is a major part of farming. The unglamorous part. Not to mention the very difficult, strenuous part. Unlike wealthy established farmers, I don't own the machinery to discard manure properly so am doing it the old fashion way...mucking and hauling it entirely by hand. With a little help from Farm Boy.

We try to clean some of the stalls over winter but it is not easy trying to maneuver a wheelbarrow through deep snow so we have to wait until the first thaw to begin cleaning out the pens entirely. We began with the biggest pen, the sheep run. Why? Because it badly needed it. The image below shows just how deep it had gotten over winter.

It is backbreaking, hand-blistering work. But the real problem is the actual hauling and piling part. We started a pile just on the other side of the barn wall so that we didn't have to haul it far but we still have the problem of piling it. I don't want to have my entire yard covered in a hundred piles of manure so try to stack the manure on top of each other but that' isn't as easy as it sounds. The manure is wet and heavy and rolling a wheelbarrow over it doesn't work. So I laid down an old board to use as a ramp to help dump the load and that seems to be working for now.

Next year I plan on mucking stalls more frequently. Or buy a tractor, a far smarter decision. Now, some farmers would see this huge mass of dung and see a beautiful bounty of fertilizer. But alas, as I don't own a field to make use out of all that rich fertilizer...it remains a big pile of shit.

Lambing Season

It is lambing season here on our farm. Half our ewes have lambed out already and we are waiting on the other half. One of the things I enjoy most about sheep farming is going down to the barn first thing in the morning and directly after work to check for new lambs on the ground. So far, our sheep have thrown us lambs nearly once a day for the past two weeks. Some days we'll even have more than the one mom lambing. Unfortunately, however, our lambing rate has only been 1.26. Very disappointing. We're hoping that improves with the remaining half of the ewes waiting to lamb.

That does not diminish how dang cute they are though. A couple photos from the barn.

Remember our bottle lambs from last spring?

This is them now.

Or at least two of them. The ram lamb which we had wanted to use as a future breeding ram, turned out to have an overbite. Not a flaw you want to potentially pass down to your lambs. It also caused him to take longer to gain weight. When he was big enough, we sent him to market. But the girls have turned out very well and we put them in with one of our breeding rams last month so fingers crossed they took.

This is our market lamb pen.

Not much, I know. And only one of them is being sold for meat. The other two (the two standing in the forefront) are both ewes and we really liked the way they developed so keeping them as future breeding ewes. The pen is pretty empty now but it will be nice and full for the Easter market.

Catch Up

It's been several months since my last post as I was busy getting ready for my oldest daughter's wedding which took place October 8. That's me with my kids and the happy couple.

But we did manage to find time for some exciting events here on the farm as well. Of course we had a couple lambings.

A puppy litter.

Attended dog shows where my daughter's registered dogs won lots of ribbons.

In particular, Hudson, our up and coming stud, did very well winning championship, then grand championship and finally Best in Show.

We finally found time to hook Pixie up to the cart. And she shocked us entirely by knowing exactly what to do. 

She was totally amazing. We took her step by step through the process of introducing a mini to cart but I am completely honest when I say that we did each step once, she passed each test and progressed on to the next level without any problem. Here is a video of her progress. Done all within a couple hours.

We've owned her for four years and have never introduced her to cart. However, it is possible she was trained before we purchased her as a four year old, That mini came to us completely broke and completly amazing. We love this mini.

The baby foal running along next to her is Oakley, the colt she gave birth to back in May. He is getting big fast.

And nearly as tall as his big sister, Blossom, now.

Here's a cute video of him herding the sheep back in the summer when he was still tiny.

Double Egg

Nope, not a double yoke which is exciting enough with my son but a double egg.

He ran down to the barn to inform me that the honking big egg I brought home from work the other day had another egg inside it. I've heard of the myth but never saw one before.

Hay Order

The first crop of hay is just getting cut from the fields around here now. For those of us who don't raise our livestock on pasture, that is a huge relief. Raising sheep, we prefer them to be on second cut as it has more nutrients and the sheep waste very little of it. But still, this year's first cut is better than last years first cut which was what we were feeding the ewes once last year's second cut ran out. So we were thankful when our hay provider contacted us and delivered a large order of hay.

There isn't quite enough to last us until second cut, but fingers crossed we have an early crop. If not, at least we know he has enough if we're still needing it. Nothing makes me happier than seeing all this green stuff in my barn.

Already my ewes are looking nice and plump.

Oh wait, that's just a pregnant ewe! Go ahead and have that baby any down now please!!!

Livestock Racks

Today's project for me was to finish the livestock racks I had begun a couple days ago. We have 8 lambs going to market but still no trailer. But I do have a truck and since they are small enough, they will all fit into the back of my pickup. I decided this time around to make livestock racks or panels instead of a livestock box. I had made one a couple years ago to fit into the back of our pickup truck but found it heavy and cumbersome.

And since I figure I will probably be putting the racks up on my own several times, it would be more convenient to racks rather than a box. So Farm Boy helped me lay out the main pieces and screw them all together.

Then I took a couple days off from the project but it needed to be done today as they go to the market tonight. I didn't have a plan or design in mind and had a hard time finding anything on a Google search, but put together something that I hoped would work. Each piece will be connected with adjustable hooks.

The back rack above the tailgate will have a swing door for easy entry and exit, however I have found the weight of the gate pulls the side panels its screwed in to, down too low. Not a major issue, but annoying. I attempted to correct this by adding a brace between both side racks above the gate, but it didn't make much difference. I will have to do some engineering thinking and figure it out, but till then, as long as it doesn't fall off, it will work just fine.

Since I didn't work from a design or plan, there were some definite mistakes and I will need to go back to the drawing board--and the saw--and make some adjustments. But for tonight, I think it will do its job. There is no roof on my livestock box and don't know yet whether that is a bad thing or not. Experience will tell.