Lamb Alert!

Colonel’s Blog, Earthdate 1 August 2023…

Hey Y’all!

Good evening and happy Tuesday from Free Missouri! We started the day with a couple of rain showers, which was amazing, and the day finished in the upper 80s and sunny. It’s supposed to be hot for the next few days with heat indices near 110. The animals are not all good today, unfortunately. Recall that yesterday I noted the ewes and lambs were doing very well. This morning, we awoke to a dead lamb. More below. Shelley made a trip to town today to visit the vet and I made things with milk. I made two batches of cheese and one of yogurt. We then spent the entire afternoon and evening working on the podcast. It would seem to be an easy thing, just stand in front of a couple of microphones and talk (top pic). Upload it, and there you have it, a podcast. Wow, that is not the case. We started working on this particular episode days ago. We had notes with high points we wanted to ensure we covered, the overall flow we wanted to follow, general times to spend on topics, etc. It takes time to set up the camera, microphones, lights, etc. In the middle of the recording, the camera battery died. We had to transition to the iPhone for the remainder of the video. But, we have a sound board that is recording the audio so that the sound quality is better. That means the video and audio must be synchronized during the editing process. Programs these days make that a bit easier than it used to be, but it still takes some work. This particular challenge was particularly challenging! You see, the camera was recording at 30 frames per second and the iPhone recorded at 29.97 frames per second. No big deal, you might think. If the video were only a minute, it wouldn’t be. Ours was 20 minutes. That means that by the end of the video, the audio was 2 seconds off. For the exact same thing, the video was 2 seconds longer than the audio. No amount of editing was working. Using Chat GPT and Shelley on the Google machine, we were able to figure out how to stretch the audio, using an audio editing program, the 2 seconds it needed to align without changing the pitch of our voices. It’s crazy how difficult simple things can be!

Sheep. Lambs. These guys are the most difficult thing on the farm, by far. I’ve chatted before about the lambs last year, but I’ll rehash it here. We decided to go all natural last lambing season. No vaccines, no dewormers. We thought that good management practice would be enough to ensure they not only survived but thrived. We were wrong. At about 10 weeks of age, the lambs started dying. By the time they stopped dying, half of them were gone. That plan obviously didn’t work. Through the year, we continuously researched the issue to determine what went wrong. We determined it was the lack of vaccination that was the culprit. We found that if you don’t administer the CD&T vaccine to your lambs, you can expect 40-60% of them to die. Since that’s exactly what we had, we decided that must be the issue and we wouldn’t repeat that again this year. As you know, we vaccinated the lambs and gave them 2 boosters, exactly as prescribed for full immunization. Things have been looking great…until today. When we awoke to a seemingly healthy but dead lamb, we had flashbacks to last summer and decided we would take it to the vet for a necropsy. We had to know what caused this so we don’t lose over half of the lambs this year. The vet’s first thought was intestinal disease from lack of vaccine. NOPE, we covered that one. The next check was to do a fecal test under the microscope looking for parasites. Bingo, there were way too many parasite eggs. The vet’s determination: respiratory and/or heart distress due to anemia caused by parasites. Not great, but also not an absolute surprise. We got the dewormer required this evening and will treat all of them in the morning, hopefully saving the remaining lambs. So, tomorrow we will move the flock into the pens so we can get to all of them and administer the medication as required. Hopefully, the Lamb Alert went out in time!

Local Farm Report for 31 July 2023:

Harvest:

21 Chicken eggs

13 Duck eggs

6 Gallons of milk

Cheers!

Psycho & Shelley