Doc’s Sunrise Rants

So my question is more general, would you be wiling to write a bit more on the keeping of the sheep and what not? I don’t know why me, a scientist mom living in serious suburbia, has an interest in agriculture but I do. And I know reading about it in blogs is the closest I’ll ever get to it. If I drag the hubby any further than 15 miles to the nearest Starbucks he tends to go into convulsions.

At some point, when the kids were young, 5 or 6, I decided that since we had a farm, we should farm something besides horses. Our piano teacher had a goat, and it had kids, and when those kids were weaned, I took them home. Because I knew ZERO about goats, those poor things died within about 6 months. I was heartbroken. I got some books about goats, and I talked to a lot of goat people, and eventually, I bought some more goats and didn’t kill them. The thing about livestock is this - they’re like children. You can read a dozen books. You can solicit advice from ‘experts’. And then you find that experience is the best teacher.

The sheep were a natural progression (for me) after the goats. Dairy, meat, fiber. I know some people eat goats, but I can’t. They’re too smart and personable. My sheep are like walking plants and I have no problem eating them. I don’t “love” any of my sheep.

Their care is similar so it’s easy to keep both. They have some different nutritional needs, so while they all graze the same pasture during the day, they go into separate pens/shelters at night where they get their customized diets (no copper for the sheep, more protein for the goats). I have a good herding dog, but by now the animals know the routine and putting them away isn’t a problem - they go into their respective areas when the sun goes down and all I have to do is close the gate.

I have streamlined all my chores so that I can feed everyone in about 20 minutes. Throw hay into feeders, dump premixed grain into troughs, fill buckets. I do it all from OUTSIDE the pens and nobody mobs me. It sounds easy but took a decade to perfect.

Milking used to take a couple hours, by hand, but I can milk my goats two at a time now, with a dual milker and two stands. In the spring I’m going to expand it to four and milking time should be cut to about half an hour, with another half an hour to wash the equipment and process the milk. I have 9 does currently, only two still milking, the others dried off because I hate milking in the winter.

I keep my own ram and buck, so I don’t have to deal with special breeding restrictions, like finding a ram, or taking my animals to be bred, or AI. I just turn out the boys and they do their thing, and they do it well. Then I wait five months and the babies pop out. In the beginning, I had crappy sheep mothers and lots of trouble during lambing. I got hard hearted and sent the bad mothers to the auction and kept the good mothers and their daughters, who then became good mothers too. Same with the goats. Most of the time lambing and kidding are uneventful. This year, the lambs should come the last two weeks of January and the kids in late April. There are folks who document every copulation and then have a date set for birth - I don’t do that. I can tell when my girls are getting read to kid/lamb. I’ve missed penning some of them up and the babies were born in the pasture - and were fine. That’s why I only keep the good mothers.

I have 20 acres of pasture and lease 40 next door. I rotate the livestock between 10 acre pastures. I have grass for them to eat anytime there isn’t snow on the ground. When it snows, I supplement with hay cut from our own hay field. I supplement minerals, and give the mothers a grain mix for a month prior to birth and until the babies are weaned. Babies get a starter grain mix, but not a commercial one because those contain antibiotics and a medication for coccidiosis. I prefer to treat illness instead of giving preventative medication, which is a small farm norm but the opposite to factory farming methods.

Right now I have a beautiful lamb roast in my crock-pot and goat’s milk in my coffee. Life is good.

It sounds easy because it is. The easy part takes a long time to get to, because in the beginning, you’re sure everything will go wrong, and it does. And then you figure it out and laugh about how little you knew before.

We don’t have Starbucks, but this is the NW, home of the coffee shop. We have a full service specialty coffee place 4.5 miles from here. It ain’t a big town, but we are a touristy destination. Ugh.