Internship and Employment opportunities!

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Do you need an internship?

We offer internships for current students: Check it out on our Learning Opportunities page.  All the details are in the flyer, also available here:

2016 Internship Flier

Our Internship structure is very fluid so that it may be fitted to the individual student's needs and goals.  You may request a whole farm internship or a focused one on Vegetables or Livestock.

General schedule:
Vegetables: 1 harvest day (Mon/Tues or Friday), 1 Market day (Wed. or Sat.), and 1 general work day.  Minimum 20 hours per week, unpaid.  Hours beyond 20 will be paid but are not guaranteed.

Livestock: 1 Market day (Wed. or Sat.), 1-2 general work days.  16-20 hours per week, unpaid.  Hours beyond 20 will be paid but may not be livestock related.

Whole Farm: Same as vegetable requirement.

To apply, we request that you send us an updated resume and cover letter detailing your goals and how you think our internship could contribute to attaining that goal.

Do you need employment?

We will be hiring part time laborers for vegetables and possibly for ad-hoc livestock fencing work from May through October.

To apply for employment opportunities send us your updated resume and cover letter.  We want to know your employment needs and how you think employment with Omache Farm can further your goals.

Never written a resume or cover letter?  WSU Students can head over to the Academic Success and Career center on campus for assistance.  We are not as familiar with UI's resources but are certain they have something similar.

Requirements:
*Hours, especially harvest, will be early.
*You will need reliable transportation to our farm which is about 10 miles south of Pullman and just 11.7 miles from Beasley coliseum.
*You will be working daily with your hands and back.  Must be able to routinely lift and carry 50 lbs

*NO EXPERIENCE REQUIRED - be willing to learn!

Shearing 2015

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You're Invited!

8am on June 8th

Omache Farm: Red Barn

It's shearing time again and we'd love to have your help!

This is a fun day of moving sheep, watching the master, Martin Dibble, shear sheep and helping to sort and pack wool.

Shearing will begin at 8am on Monday, June 8th in the Red Barn next to our house and will likely go until after lunchtime.

Feel free to bring a sack or picnic lunch to eat on our farm after the shearing is done.

Please wear closed-toe shoes, long pants, a hat and bring a water bottle.  Children are welcome to this work party also!  

Please RSVP by emailing omachefarm@gmail.com.  Feel free to share this event with others as well!

Directions are available HERE.

Parking: 
There should be parking available in the gravel strip in front of our house or turn left at the corner and go up the road towards the grain elevator.  Turn left just past the elevator onto the farm road: there is parking available there and on the drive that goes around the elevator.

Shearing 2014

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As always, pictures will follow!  (This year, HannaMae took most of them so be sure to check out who took them: you may be surprised!)

Shearing!  Our annual time to catch up with our favorite shearer: Martin, and let our sheep turn on the AC!  And laugh at how silly the alpacas look without any fur anymore!  I actually mistook one for a deer yesterday…

            This year presented even more challenges than usual.  First, we had no barn.  That means, I had no way to guarantee that the sheep would be dry come shearing day.  One very good reason to wait until June to shear.  The second large challenge to having no barn is that now, we had no partially set up facilities for collecting, holding and feeding sheep into the pen with Martin to be shorn: We had to build something.  Luckily, we already have a stash of cattle panels and t-posts around for building various catch pens and loading chutes for sheep and pigs.  It took us a little while to decide on a good place that was flat, close to the house for electricity and big enough to hold everyone but once we did building something proved relatively easy.

            The fun part came when it was time in the morning to collect everyone in the chute.  While the majority of the sheep have been collected and shorn before, this particular setup was new (which equals extra skittishness) and there is always at least one extra skitter individual anyhow.  Add in younger lambs who scatter when herded like an ant nest when you stab it with a large stick as well as the alpacas who simply despise shearing day and never go the way you want anyhow and you have a recipe for sheep anywhere but where you need them to be.  Mix in one panel that wasn’t tied quite tightly enough and you get escaped unshorn sheep too.

            Stir it all together and you get lots of frustration, lots of laughs, luckily a good natured shearer, a great deal of learning and about 60 new fleeces that need new homes soon!  

Keep an eye out: we’ll post pictures soon! (Photos mostly taken by HannaMae!)

Lambs Finally!

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Lambs are HERE!  Did I say that already?  Oh well, there were a handful showing up last week but this week seems to be THE week for dropping little lambs.  We’ve even had a rather amazing group of them!

            Jacobs, being a smaller, heritage breed of sheep, are not known for having more than one lamb each season.  They can, however ewes who regularly drop twins are comparatively rare.  Larger, more commercialized breeds of sheep, such as Rambouillet or Suffolks have twins and even triplets as a matter of routine.

            One of our lovely Jacobs, gave birth to not just twins but triplets on Sunday!  Two little girls and a little boy, all with plenty of spots.  One of the girls, the tiniest of the three, we decided to make into a bottle lamb.  If we still had our barn or another place where we can pen them up and keep a much closer eye on mama and babies, I would have loved to allow her to keep all three for a few days to see if she really could raise all three.  In the interest of the welfare of the smallest lamb, she is now living in our house and for the most part, is relatively quiet as long as she has company.  Whether it is one of us, the children or the dogs, she doesn’t much care.  So far she has been eating enthusiastically and growing well for starting out at only three pounds or so at birth.  Her siblings are outside with their mother and also doing well.

            All of the lambs are growing fast and stretching their springs.  One of the older rambouillets has already made it to 16 pounds! Granted, they usually weigh in at around 8lbs at birth so far.  They are adorable to watch spring around the pasture playing while their mothers rest or eat.  Hopefully, I’ll have a chance to take some photos before next week’s newsletter!

The Great Sheep Escape

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On Sunday, our sheep FINALLY began to lamb!  As of yesterday, we had three beautiful Jacob lambs and one Rambouillet lamb.  So far, pretty good, especially on pasture.  On Monday, Genny, one of our Interns, and I, Margaret, went out to fence fresh grass for all of our lovely ruminants.

If they could have only waited five more minutes for us to finish the last of the new fence, we’d have needed to earn our exercise elsewhere this week.  But no!  They had decided that they were apparently hungry enough that they had to simply try to reach fresh grass by sticking a head between a post for the electric fence and a post for the woven wire fence which of course popped the electric connector off the hotwire above the woven wire fence to create a lovely new gate.

Out they ALL go.  Well, except for the three Jacob mamas.  They decided to stay and let their babies hunker down instead of go adventuring.

The gate the sheep had made was about 15 feet away from where the new fence was going to be.  They decided to head up into the neighbor's field and then around the end of our woven wire fencing back onto our ground to gobble up as much of our winter wheat cover crop as possible.  The alpacas, while munching, must be charged with the duty of scoping out the new fence when they move.  The sheep generally follow the alpacas because apparently alpacas know where they're going, right? (hahaha!)

Off they go, gobbling as fast as possible and walking up towards the road and away from the new area into which they were SUPPOSED to go.  Genny and I drop what we're doing and race to try and get around the sheep and attempt to bring them back.  Whether they go back into the old area or the new we don't care as long as they are in some area with a fence.  We manage to get them back to the corner where they escaped, albeit on the other side of the woven wire fence and just as the sheep are thinking about heading into a fenced area, the Alpacas decide that can't be right and take everyone off in the other direction through our neighbor's field of peas.

Genny is on that end of the sheep so I send her to attempt to get in front of them.  The alpacas have done this game before and decide to keep up the pace and keep going.

They traveled all the way down the field, nearly to our distant ponds before a turn in the hills caused the alpacas (and entourage) to pause and think long enough for Genny to catch up with them and attempt to send them back the way they came.

Instead of going into their newly prepared fence, for which I was attempting to create an entrance gate, they took off back up the pea field back towards our winter wheat.  When they got there, the Alpacas decided that wasn't right so they kept going and took everyone up to the road and towards the veggies and our landlord's house.  Of course, Genny and I are now BOTH behind everyone.  without a speedy dog, there was absolutely zero turning them around at this point.  

Our only saving grace was the fact that Ronn, our other intern, Dave, and our employee, Dan, were down in that field transplanting green onions.  Dan happened to look up and see sheep.  Ronn turned around expecting to see a few renegade creatures and instead, they saw the ENTIRE FLOCK.  Thank goodness they were there because they were able to help us get them turned around and walking down the access road and back towards their original enclosure.

Now that they'd managed to gobble enough to sate their crazy appetites and were back to simply starving (likely from all that running now...) they were content to walk in a group down the access road and back into their fenced area.  Once they were in, it took us about 5 minutes to finish setting the new fence.  Dan and Dave herded the sheep from their old area into their new and as soon as they saw the fresh new grass, they were happy once again.

And we decided that it was lunch time.

NOW it's spring on the palouse

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There are two things on our farm on the palouse that signify spring is here.  The first is the winds.  They are always blowing... hard.  they usually start in mid February and blow most of the way through March.  The upside is that it starts being sunnier here when all the clouds get blown right past you.  This morning dawned partly cloudy and surprisingly only mildly windy.  Today was the first day that the sun peeked above the hills before HannaMae's bus arrived.

The second thing that signifies spring on the palouse is restless sheep.

Makes sense, right?  No more snow covering the ground and things are starting to warm up and grow fresh green grass.  WAAAAAY better than all that dusty dry straw they've been eating all winter.  Grass, oat or alfalfa, it doesn't matter how much they've been spoiled or not because the fresh green stuff is always better than any type of hay.

The ramboulliets apparently just whine. Baa, Baa, Baa.

The Jacobs are too smart for that.  They have learned that sometimes the people hide the good grass outside the fences.  ometimes next to the red barn, sometimes over past the gardens.  Sometimes the people even hide the grass up the road by Betty's house.  The Jacobs have also learned that barbed wire, especially ancient falling down fence, doesn't hurt.  Those fences are really more of a suggestion than a rule.

The main reason those fences never have been fixed is because they are on the border with a grain field which happens to be uphill.  Those particular neighbors are better than others about plowing more soil downhill on top of the fence but there's still a nice cliff between the edge of their field and the old fence.  We are working with our landlord to be allowed to build a new fence for that section on top of the field.  We just only have room for so many projects each year.

That all aside, the Jacobs or rather a few particular escape artists, have figured out the easiest sections to climb through.  The easiest fix? grab one of our small panel sections, climb the pasture hillside, attach the panel section over the wooly area of fence.

The hard part is to then go find the adventuresome sheep and convince them they need to go home.  The first part of spring is easy: there isn't really much grass to argue over.  Give it a few weeks and the sheep probably won't believe me anymore...

Barn burned down...Hay anyone?

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Our sheep barn burned down this morning.  Pictures below plus more can be found at the Facebook Photos link above.

All the creatures got out. and are fine.  We got there early enough to shoo the piglets out and Jason had to pull Missy the goat's head out of a fence and grab her kid but everyone is out and fine.

If anyone has a little extra hay, please let us know!  We can pay for it.  Small squares are best: we don't have the equipment to move large squares or rounds.  We've been using about 4-6 bales per day.

Baby lambs!

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Surprise Surprise!  not one but TWO new little lambs on the 3rd and 4th of July!

Can you find them both?

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It's Lamb Time!

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Surprise!  Apparently summer wasn't too hot because here they come!  Earlier than ever!

So far, we have 3 ewe lambs (one set of twins! yay!) and two goat kids (one of each).

Let the adorableness ensue!
Pictures:

Smart Farmers

 Every now and again, I find some method or piece of equipment or even sometimes simply a mindset that completely changes how things are done around here.  When we took our last batch of lambs from 2011 into slaughter a few weeks ago, Jason took the time to clean out the old loading chute and ramp.

Perhaps now would be the moment for a tiny bit of farm history...

The property we are renting last had cattle on it about a decade ago and the last time the owners of the property had animals was about two decades ago.  Suffice to say, the original animal handling facilities were built a LONG time ago.  Since then the facilities haven't exactly been kept up.  Jason spent most of a day ripping old fencing material out of frozen layers of mud in the chute and loading ramp.  He also spent a good chunk of time sawing the mostly-dead elderberry tree out of the middle of the ramp so that animals can walk all the way up.  Needless to say, he was a wee bit sore the day after.

Our first experiences with catching and loading sheep involved a lot of worked up sheep, three adults and some spectacular catches along with a nearly broken knee.

Our second experiences with catching and loading sheep involved a lot of making do with lots of random bits of fence and lots and lots and LOTS of baling wire.  And a busted rib from a confused ewe.

On our own farm, our two favorite pieces of equipment for working with our sheep is cattle panels and spiral  Panel Hinges from Premier 1 Supplies.  It's flexible, light-weight, mobile and effective.  We can set it up anywhere and have a pretty good facility for handling and sorting our sheep.

Third time's the charm, right?

Back to the original chute and loading ramp.

With our panels cut into 4 and 8 foot sections and hinged together, we can sort out individuals with one person when everyone cooperates.  Once that's done, we can use the old gates to get the appropriate lambs into the old chute, ready to go.  We even managed to do all this with a minimum of "Baa-ing."  That means they're relatively un-stressed.

Once we set up the rack on our little truck and backed it up to the old ramp we realized the ramp had obviously been built for BIG trucks.  Luckily, our sheep have no problem with hopping down the couple feet into the bed of our truck.

We opened up the gates to allow the lambs up the ramp to the back of the truck. They took a minute to navigate where the elderberry had grown through the heavy boards and then hopped down into the truck without needing to be pushed from behind at all.  We closed up the truck and stood around wondering what we had missed doing.  In the past we always needed to collect more animals or re-collect escapees or otherwise do more work after loading our charges that we felt like we were missing something!

I can now say I have three favorite pieces of handling equipment: panels, hinges and a well-built loading ramp.

Little Shepherdess

A few weeks ago, The sheep were fenced into an area between our garden sections.  There are about 7 lambs that simply do not respect our four-strand electric fencing in part because of their full wool coats (insulating against shocks).  Thus, we were constantly having several lambs out and eating grass by the old grain elevator, eating weeds in the squash and corn, luckily leaving the crops themselves alone.  Not a huge deal but a nuisance.  Jason was working on a small wier in the creek to allow us to pump water for the garden even during the dryest parts of summer.  Up to his elbows in creek muck, literally, HannaMae came down and informed him that there were sheep out of the fence.  Jason told her he would have to handle it in a few minutes.  "I'll take care of it" she said and marched off.  A few minutes later, Jason started thinking about what HannaMae had said and went to see what she and Alethea were up to.

HannaMae was directing Alethea to walk this way and that and was using her as a blockade to collect and drive the lambs back inside the fence.

They did it all by themselves, a nearly 4 year old and nearly 2 year old.  no help or direction from Papa, on their own initiative, smartly and safely.

Little shepherdesses with a knack for the art.

Jumpy Jacobs

Jacobs are known to be flighty by nature.  This trait is definitely heritable and some are more flighty than others.  Generally, our flock seems to not be as flighty as their breed’s reputation.  As individuals become familiar with us as their caretakers and as they age, they seem to generally relax.  Some of it is also experience.  As they have seen all there is to see, they start to know what to expect.  Perhaps it’s just us and our attitude towards them but our sheep seem generally as calm as any other flock of sheep.  We also learned early on when working with sheep that having any sort of handling facility with a proper setup of squeeze pen and gate is immensely helpful for any number of sheep above zero, as is a calm and in control mindset. 

At the first farm that we spent time on, Jacobs were the breed of choice.  While they had been in business a number of years, the farm was quite small and handling facilities were not really an option.  We only really needed to work with them a few times while we were there and we set up a temporary squeeze pen for drawing blood samples, for shearing we caught them in the field.  The owner had  decided that it was better to shear them herself with the help of her husband.  That was where Jason and I each got to shear our first sheep.  It was difficult to say the least and now I am more than willing to pay our dear shearer to come in once a year and get it all done on one day.  Two minutes a sheep versus our 60 minutes per sheep is well worth every penny!  Catching the sheep on the day we were going to shear them at our first place however was less than easy.  They had enough open space that it took three of us a while to catch a hold of just one sheep and in the process we riled them all up in their full wooly coats on some rather hot days.  It also allowed for incidents like nearly having my knee smashed to pieces by one who wished to go underneath me rather than around.  Luckily, she missed.

While we were going to school at WSU we worked with a gentleman who no longer had much in the way of handling facilities.  Our sheep ran with his for a while and he told us that they made his sheep more difficult to handle.  We also couldn't get anywhere near his rams in order to collect ours when we were ready to move them to land of our own.  Part of that was his rams were used to him and wouldn't come near us as unfamiliar people.  Some people call them jumpy.  I think they're still smart, for a sheep anyways.

While in school, I spent a little bit of time at the University of Idaho sheep facility.  They were fully setup everywhere to facilitate easy movement and handling of sheep there.  If you needed to wort a group into two, you'd take them up to the sorting pens.  During lambing season, the pens and gates were arranged so that all you had to do was open the gate and walk behind the ewe and she would end up where you wanted her to go. 

Granted, the U of I sheep facility was built with sheep and only sheep in mind and had been there a long time.  Most of us don't have that luxury. Most of us must build our own systems within our capital and land constraints.  Most of us have more than just sheep living on our farms.  For us, we are planning on eventually having a great variety of livestock living here and everything we build must reflect that somehow.  Building for ourselves a permanent and appropriately sized handling system of pens, chutes and gates is both a priority and large challenge.  A priority because already we are up to thirty breeding adults with more being added every year.  With lambs this year, we have about fifty animals to work with at any given time.  This is a large enough group that we feel the costs of a permanent system will benefit us greatly both economically and mentally.  It is a huge challenge because we are definately not done growing our flock yet and we don't want to build something too small but it has to be able to work with very few animals at a time as well and not be simply too big.  We also have to fit it in amongst other facilities like a barn and chicken coop that are both also being utilized and in between land features like a creek and the general palouse hillsides.  Oh yes, and it must fit in with our capital restraints as well.

In the time between now and when we get to build our handling system, we use a lot of T-posts and cattle panels.  We also lucked by some large sheets of lightweight concrete reinforcing panels which are very similar to cattle panels.  We but them up and left long posts on one side so that we essentially have step-in panels now.  Permanent or not, having a way to direct our flock so that there is only one way to move makes life much easier for us and much less stressful for our animals.  It is an important consideration for any sheep owner and one I feel that isn't touched on a lot in literature, especially for the small time folks.  Most of our convictions about handling facilities and methods has come from experience rather than school or books.  If you are considering investing in a permanent facility for livestock handling, take a look at the book Humane Livestock Handling: Understanding Livestock Behavior and Building Facilities for Healthier Animals by Temple Grandin.  It discusses theory and methods for calm handling techniques as well as how to build a system and facilitates proper handling of livestock.

Some folks call Jacob sheep flighty, jumpy, crazy.  I call them smart.

HannaMae Saved the Lamb

About a month ago, we had a surprise lamb in late May.  He came from a yearling ewe that we had previously thought had lost her lamb.  Just like her mother, Penny gave no signs of being pregnant and dropped her first lamb with nothing more than the bleat of a baby to announce it's own arrival.

The afternoon that Penny dropped her lamb, Jason moved the sheep, as planned, into a pasture that encompassed a section of the creek running through the farm.  We have a small bridge spanning the creek but as the creek is not very wide, it is common for the sheep to simply hop the creek to get where they're going.

Being a first-time mom, Penny had yet to learn what her baby could and could not yet do.  While Penny had no problem hopping the creek, her toddling lamb still wasn't quite strong enough and ended up hopping into the creek instead.

HannaMae watched Penny's lamb try to follow it's mother and when she saw the lamb fall into the creek, she ran to her Papa who she knew could save the lamb.  After a moment of translating "the lamb is bubbling!" into "the lamb is in the creek!"  Jason took off for the creek.  He threw himself on the ground and pulled the lamb from the water.  a moment of inspection determined the lamb to be fine and he gently tossed the lamb across he creek to his mother.

The lamb had indeed been bubbling, being able to only get his nose above the water about half of his jumps.  Being spring the water in the creek easily runs several feet deep and had HannaMae not seen the lamb, he may have very well been lost.

Three cheers for HannaMae!  Who still will begin telling you some version of how she saved the lamb whenever she gets the chance!

Lambs 2011

Hooray!  Our first two lambs arrived this weekend!  We don't know which of our two rams are the sire this year because life got a little too crazy last fall and we didn't do separate breeding pastures.  So any that I wish to register with the JSBA this year can't be any higher than FF (Foundation Flock).  Not a terrible loss since the ones we bought last spring are all there anyways.  Next year we will do some more testing as far as what the ram's genes look like, Abe especially.

But, so far it looks like we've got good genes on at least the ewe's side!

#1 comes from one of our newly-bought ewes.  Her four horns are gorgeously set and she's nicely spotted.  Her little ram lamb is also.  He also has 3-4 horn buds as far as I can tell as yet.


 #2 came from a Khatadin-Jacob crossed ewe lamb.    Except for the eye split in one of his left eyes, he's also very nice looking as far as the Jacob genes are concerned.  In fact, the only reason I might know him to be 1/4 Khatadin would be if he was polled!  I'm not sure where the gene causing the eye split came from: mama, grandma, Abe or Tierny.  My most likely suspect I think may be from his mother's dam but I don't know who that is anymore.  No matter what, he sure is cute!

Well, I expect to post more lamb updates this week!  I'll be going to go check on them again later tonight because there was one yearling who was showing signs of labor earlier. 

So Far, so good!  *knock on wood!*