Colonel’s Blog, Earthdate 16 April 2024…
Hey Y’all!
Good afternoon and happy Tuesday from Air2Ground Farms! We’ve been experiencing beautiful spring weather recently. Today has a few popup thunderstorms but is still a nice day. The big news on the farm is the beef herd is on the move and grazing! We started them moving yesterday when we released them from their winter pasture. We moved them into a pasture that is about 5 acres and we only left them there for 24 hours. This morning we moved them again to an 8 acre pasture. We will only leave them there for 24 hours and then move them again to another big area. Our goal is to get them back in the habit of moving daily while stimulating but not stunting the new grass. They weren’t very excited about moving this morning. They were quite happy with the big pasture of new grass we gave them yesterday. But we were finally able to convince them to get moving. Their bellies are so full that they only spent a few minutes grazing in the new area before they were lying around chewing cud. The last pic is the herd in the new pasture yesterday. Tank is doing well in his retraining. The middle two pics are three young, not pregnant, ewes in the pen with him. He seems to be back to his normal nonchalance regarding the sheep. We’re still having new lambs almost daily, so we’re going to continue to hold him outside the lambing area for the time being. We are up to 31 ewe lambs and 21 ram lambs with more still to come. Happy and her baby (we decided to name her Mary) are both doing well! Happy is up to 3 1/2 gallons of milk the past 2 mornings. Well done! The 3 guilts are still doing well and are on a bit of a diet as their existence has transitioned from butcher hogs to breeder hogs. They need to be a bit slimmer than they are currently so we’ve reduced them from about 9 pounds of feed per day to about 5. That leaves us with the discussion raised by the title.
I’ve written a Farmer Fail and a Farmer Win blog, so given this incident, I’ll call it a Farmer Tie. I will start by saying we are doing considerably better this year in the lambing department. Our accounting practices are allowing us to make decisions based on data that we were unable to make in the past. Holding the ewes and lambs in a dry lot during this lambing season has also been immensely helpful because we can spend time with them multiple times a day and have a great feel for how each of them are doing individually. Over the weekend, we noticed a little ram lamb coughing and were able to treat him for pneumonia—which we couldn’t have done if they were in paddocks and moving daily. We also noticed a little ram lamb that didn’t seem to be growing and was quite skinny. His twin sister seemed to be doing ok. We pulled him aside, gave him some extra energy from a pump liquid and a shot of B-vitamins. We put him back with his mom and sister. The following day, he was still alive, but still very puny. His sister, on the other hand, was dead. We caught the mom and found that she was producing very little milk, not close to enough to keep the two lambs alive. So, we pulled the little ram and he joined the bottle lamb group. This morning, we noticed another little ewe lamb that looked very skinny and hunched (a tell-tale sign that they are hungry). We picked her up and no ewe came to check on her when she cried. We finally found the mom and tried to get them back together and she simply ignored the lamb…another bottle lamb to the group. That puts us to 5 bottle lambs. And, 2 ewes will be joining the next batch of hogs on their trip to the processor at the end of the month. We will have them processed for our freezer as Mutton (over 2 years old) and Hogget (1-2 years old). I could process them myself but just don’t have the time at this moment, and they package things very nicely at the processor! We lost a little ewe lamb but saved the little ram who is already growing and doing amazing…I’ll call it a FARMER TIE.
Saturday’s video was a look at us moving the beef chickens out onto pasture and a discussion of the rotation through chicken-season.
Monday’s Dust’er Mud Podcast featured a returning guest, Mr. Tim Arbeiter. Tim did an amazing job educating all of us on the differences between currency and money, the definition of fiat, and how it all matters to those of us who enjoy freedom.
Cheers!
Psycho & Shelley
When I saw "tie" I thought perhaps you were adopting a business-formal attire code at the farm! 😃