escapee
A lone lamb grazes across the hillside, separated from the flock by several hundred feet and an electric fence. The “flock” in question here is a motley collection of animals; there are our two goats, Robin Hood and Little Black (like everything else named by the children), then there is the ewe that we bought as a feeder last year. Feeder, for the uninitiated, is a lamb to be fattened for the table. In fact the word gives the wrong message, since it seems to conjure images of the animal being stuffed, or fattened in some ungainly, foie gras kind of a way. The fact is we turn them loose on reasonably good pasture and let them at it. I only occassionally give them pellets, usually to get them to come to me if I need them to.
Feeders
Anyway, this lamb turned out to be the biggest of the four we bought. So we kept her (she was a ewe) and decided to have a go at breeding. She is a Dorset Freisan mix, the Dorset being heavier set, with more hair around the face, and the Freisan being finer-boned and more of a dairy breed. We took her to Luke’s place, where he had a virile Navajo Churro Ram by the name of Panda (‘cos of his coloring). We turned her in with the Ram, and left her there for a couple of weeks, then brought her home. Several months later we booked tickets to England to visit our peeps. Then, when we consulted the calendar and did a little math, we realized she would probably lamb while we were away. Shit.
Back on the phone to Luke. “Can you watch our sheep for a couple of weeks? She’ll probably lamb while we’re away, and that’s good for us, because we don’t know what we’re doing, and you do.”
Luke was unphazed and graciously took her in, saying that usually the lambs plop right out.
Strangely enough we did have sheep for several years while I was growing up in Devon. In fact we had about 400 at any time. Why did I not know more about the process? Well, I was away at boarding school, and my dad was a gentleman farmer who employed a farm manager. Truth is out. That said, we did often get up in the middle of a January night and do lamb patrol, and we often bottle fed lambs, but I never put my hand up a sheep’s ‘tube. Therefore my technical knowledge of this kind of animal husbandry was limited. We were used as sheep dogs quite often. Sometimes we ran after them, sometimes we rode our dirt bikes to round them up. We were also pretty good (my brother and I) and manhandling them into the sheep dip–a kind of concrete bunker with water and disinfectant in it.
lucy
So while Luke watched the ewe, we jetted off to the old country and drank dark ale and danced around the may pole. Actually it was March. The daffodils were out, and the weather was fine. Two weeks later we came back, and to my amazement she had not lambed yet. This meant that we would be on watch. So we took her back home, looking extremely preggers (she, not us–that came a little while later). But it was a full two weeks more until she popped. It happened one night, and Conrad, always the first one up, came running into the house to tell us the news. We came to the barn and found her licking the afterbirth off the lamb, who looked great (a ewe). We took a quick glance at Sheparding for Dummies, and snipped off her umbilical, swabbed the stub with iodine, checked the ewe’s teats for squirtage, and that was about it. Done deal.
Snowflake
So that gets me back to the motley flock. Apart from the Ewe and her lamb (named Prancer, then changed to Snowflake–because of her coloring) there are two other lambs. These are the feeders I bought from Perry Ells up in Union Maine. She runs a 60 acre sheep farm in some hard scrabble country which she and her husband cleared themselves, reclaiming land from the forest. The area has a certain Scottish beauty to it, hilly and wooded, with plenty of ferns, swamps, and outcroppings of granite. There are remnants of old homesteads in the woods, every so often you come across a stone wall where a livestock corral had been, or the foundation of a house. The Finns settled the area so there would have been plenty of hardscrabble sheep too.
This year I only bought two feeders. We had Prancer and her mother already, but it was clear that we would not be able to slaughter Prancer, so we had to look elsewhere for food. This kind of carnivorous thinking begins to sound very grim sometimes, and it makes Perry Ell’s all-natural farm look like a death camp. The two lambs we bought from her were like adolescent orphans in comparison to Prancer. They were twice her size (because six weeks older) and tried to suckle from her mother (which they did not succeed in doing). They will be the unlucky ones. the problem is, however, if we are to continue eating our own lamb, then at some point we’re going to have to…eat our own lambs, that is, ones we have “birthed” on the farm. If we can’t imagine eating Prancer, how will it be different with Fluffy, or Snowdrop, or Kebab?
Here is the rub (and I’m not referring to the spice rub): One hears that if one is to eat meat one should be ok with the killing process. But we’ve done that, and are not particularly OK with it. But is it evil to prefer to pick up one’s meat at the deli counter? This way you don’t have to face your lamb as you load it into the truck and take it to slaughter. For people of weak moral character this is probably the way out. Don’t think about it.
Eat Me
We still have lots of meat from the three we butchered last November. The two feeders I bought this year were another Freisan dorset mix (ram), and a suffolk Freisan mix. The Suffolks are good meat sheep because they have long backs, yielding lots of loin, which is the good stuff.
But it was the Dorset who was grazing off by himself, outside the electric fence. He has been getting out for a week or two now, nosing his way under the lowest string of the fence. The fence is very imperfect. Being cheap, I have not invested in a pricey electro-plastic netting system, instead I opted for a system of electric wire which is attached to plastic poles with insulators. The whole setup is powered by a small solar charger. Because I’ve fenced in a good-sized area of at least half an acre, I’ve had to splice the wire in several places. This creates potential for the charge to get lost, in addition to the vagaries of the sun. You might think, reading this, that I do this to give myself a headache, and perhaps you are right. Add to this the fact that sheep’s wool is thick, and that’s why the lamb doesn’t feel a thing when he goes under the wire. Its his unwavering herd instinct which keeps him from wandering off, so he grazes on excellent, untouched grass which is being saved for their next rotation, all by himself, like a solitary diner at a fancy restaurant. The only question is, why don’t the others do it?
greener grass
Rotation is the word when it comes to grazing, as practiced by all good grass farmers–smaller the paddocks the better. Since my fencing setup is a pain to move I don’t do it as often as I would like. In general sheep don’t like to graze too close to their feces. This is good becuase if they did they’d get parasites (which they do often anyway), and there being many different types, it can be difficult to get rid of them by dosing. The trick with rotational grazing is to get them to eat the pasture uniformly, not leaving out the stuff they are perfectly capable of eating, but would prefer not to, like a kid eating the meat and leaving the broccoli. If they over-eat some plants they risk killing them, while others are under-grazed and gain supremacy in the pasture. That is why small paddocks encourage ruminants to eat all the plants, and when they are done, you move the fence. How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?
truly free range
Latest concession to extreme winter temperatures, and the eternal struggle for health in adverse climates? Sauna. This one is wood fired, built of 6×6 hemlock. My friend Luke at Rock an Inch Farm designed it and we put it together in a few days. This is an old Finnish design, built essentially like a log cabin, with overlapping logs, kind of like a Lincoln Log design. Difference from a log cabin: we didn’t use logs, but milled lumber with straight edges. We did not notch the ends of the timbers, just timberlock screwed them together. Yes, there will be some shrinkage as the hemlock dries, and probably some twisting; that’ll entail a little tweaking and caulking at some pont.
