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.

Lambs can be so.... challenging.

It's a good thing that they're edible.

Now maybe that's mean.  We definately do not do enough handling of our sheep, especially the lambs for them to learn that people really are okay.  The adults have lost their edginess around us and the yearling mamas have begun to lose their edge too, although they are still at the back of the pack and a few tend to get left behind with the lambs sometimes.  Jacob sheep are known for their flightiness and difficulty in handling.  I don't knwo if it's just us or our particular group but they don't seem much flightier than any other group of sheep I've worked with.  Smarter, certainly but not any flightier, really.

Tomorrow morning, we were going to move our ewes and lambs into the next pasture over from where they were the past week.  There were several things that weren't quite right. 

1.  Somehow, last week while in the previous pasture that was next to the rams, one ewe and her two lambs (both males) got themselves into the ram pasture and couldn't get themselves back.  I'll have to be watching that one in mid-december for lambs.  Our rams have never been fertile this time of year before, too hot, but it's been much cooler lately... hmm. 

2. Goats weren't really supposed to be mixed with the ewes yet, but there they were.  Stubborn goats!

3. a couple of lambs had been making adventures somehow into another pasture in the old orchard. 

This time, when I went to check on sheep after market before going home for the evening, the lamb escapees couldn't figure out how to get back into the correct pasture with mum.  I'd have to convince them through a gate, relatively easy.  There were also some lambs already in the next pasture.  Well, I guess it'll be tonight while I've got light rather than tomorrow when I should be building the next fence for the next pasture.  While I'm at it, I might as well get the ewe out of the rams.  Because she has to males for lambs, I don't care if they stay or come with.  They stayed, this particular ewe is particularly un-flighty and loves people because people always bring grain.  I got her through the fence with little problem.  Getting her away from her lambs (still nursing some even though they are 5 1/2 months old!) was more challenging but grain solved the issue, the first time.  Second problem was getting her into the ewe group.

For some reason, in hoping that ALL the ewes and lambs would follow me and my grain bucket, I left the gate open enough to admit Sweetpea, my errant ewe, but most of the lambs and the alpacas and the goats decided the last pasture would be better.  The adult ewes went with me and I got them into the correct pasture.

Next step was retrieving everyone else.  Not too challenging except that SweetPea wanted to go back to her lambs, and the lambs and yearlings were confused because they could see their mothers on the other side of the fence of the old pasture.  I had to go all the way back across the pasture and start over and herd everyone back to the gate to their most recent pasture.  convincing the alpacas has so far been the most difficult but thye actually led the lambs through.  The goats had a mind of their own so I let them stay behind.  The alpacas impressed me by leading the lambs around and through a gate to get to the opening in the fence for the next pasture.  The lambs piled past them once they realized which pasture they were in since they'd been there before.  The poor alpacas nearly fell into the creekbed but quickly figured it out.

All I had left was the three individual goats.  Once I got them headed in the right direction and through the gate, all I had left to do was tie up the gate again and amost every difficulty had been fixed, about an hour after I began.  All I'll have to fix later is getting the two lambs out of the ram group but we'll be into breeding season before the first ones go to slaughter and I'll have to sort the rams then. 

I do love my sheep.