Fences

Our fences are old. Some of them are thirty years old, some only twenty and a few interior fences, dividing one pasture into two, are only ten years old. But our fences are failing.

All but one of our exterior fences are woven wire stock fencing stapled onto wooden fence posts. The woven wire is designed with smaller openings on the bottom (2” high by 6” wide) and larger openings on the top (up to 6” by 6”). This clever design is to keep animals from sticking their heads through the fence and getting stuck and in the process destroying the fence. This clever design works really well for sheep, but not so well for goats. The goats put a lot of pressure on our fences.
We practice rotational grazing which means that the animals are restricted to one small pasture until they have cleaned it up and then are moved to another small pasture, repeating this schedule all summer long. This means that the best tasting grass is always in the next pasture and the goats are smart enough to know that, so they stick their heads through the fences to eat the fresh grass on the other side.

Over the years we’ve repaired a lot of holes in fences.

We also have one strand of barbed wire at the base of each exterior fence and two strands at the top, to keep dogs and coyotes out of our pastures and our animals in. Our interior fences don’t have barbed wire anywhere. They were made by stretching four foot high woven wire stock fencing onto metal fence posts designed for the purpose. Those metal posts worked well for about twenty years and then we began to run into problems.

After awhile, the wire began to sag. The four foot high fence became a three foot high fence in the middle between some posts. The sheep don’t often jump a fence; the goats reliably do. Every time a goat jumped a fence, she dragged a little on the woven wire. The fence got even lower. The sag combined with the patched holes meant that the fence was no longer stretched. It became increasingly easier for goats to force holes in the fence with their heads, then their shoulders and finally their entire bodies. Once the goats had made holes, the lambs followed. A good mother will follow her lamb anywhere, so the ewes followed the lambs.

Some of our fences are completely porous to animals. It’s been a hassle, but not a catastrophe on the interior fences until Bucklet, the cute, tiny ,bottle kid we added to our flock last year, became sexually mature. Yesterday we moved Bucklet and Winthrop the ram to the farthest pasture from the ewes and the goats and the lambs. By the time Dave had walked back across three pastures to the lamb pasture, Bucklet and Winthrop had rejoined him. We collected our fencing supplies and moved the two males back to their pasture. Then we wove wire and stapled until we were sure the hole was closed.

They rejoined us five minutes later. We led them back to their pasture and spent half an hour actually inspecting the fence and checking for all possible holes. The males were back with the lambs by lunch time. We left them there. The lambs are too small to get pregnant yet, and the ewes are still two pastures away in a well fenced pasture and we need a little breathing room to figure out what to do next.

We have walked every foot of our fence line in the last month. It looks thirty years old. We were thirty something when we first learned how to fence. Now at sixty something it seems a much bigger job. Maybe that’s why farmers retire, they can’t bear the thought of refencing.

Nine vultures

photo from en.wikipedia.com

Nine vultures circled our pastures. Something bad had happened. I wasn’t surprised that there might be a dead animal out there. Lamb #59 had been getting weaker and all the intestinal wormers, coccidiostats and antibiotics had made no difference. We could see his backbones and his pelvic bones. He looked and acted like he was starving.

Nine vultures seemed a little extreme for one tiny lamb. It wasn’t just lamb #59; six lambs were dead.

Vultures are scavengers, not predators. We did not lose six animals to vultures, the vultures were benefiting from our losses. Why were lambs dying? The animals were in four different pastures. They all had access to fresh water, to shade for part of each day, to grass. We thought we had a basically healthy flock on luxuriant pastures. This was supposed to be the easy time of the year for the sheep.

However, a fair number of lambs had diarrhea. We took a fecal sample in to the vet. They found lots of round worms, a high enough concentration of which can kill lambs. We had wormed our lambs three weeks previously, they should have been protected for several months. Why hadn’t we had this problem before? What was the difference?

One month seemed to be the difference. Normally our lambs are born in February and March. We feed them creep feed for the next month or two and they are ready to wean and turn out on fresh pasture by the end of May. This year, our lambs were born in April and we didn’t wean them until the end of June so they’d have two months of creep feeding. They spent an extra month in the home pasture, a place where intestinal worm cysts had been collecting all winter. They had eaten so many worm cysts, that a single worming was not enough. I should have realized that diarrhea meant there was a problem. The first lamb I lost twenty-nine years ago was infected with Haemonchus contortus, the barberpole worm. I thought I had learned that lesson forever, but this year, my mind was somewhere else when I watched lambs with continuing diarrhea. . The diarrhea dehydrates the lamb. The worm also causes irritation in the gut lining and protein leaks from the cells of the lining, starving the lamb. My lambs didn’t have a chance. They depend on their shepherd to make the right decision and this year, I hadn’t.

We wormed our lambs again. Fewer have diarrhea, but we’ve lost another lamb and two more still look like they are starving. They are on fresh pasture and hopefully will recover. I am ashamed that it took nine vultures to alert me to a problem that I should have recognized immediately. The next time we change anything about the way we lamb, we will try to keep our brains engaged.

The price of lamb

The price of lamb is down this year. For years, we’ve ignored the market price of lambs at the stockyard because we sold our lamb for $1 per pound, a price that the Bosnian refugees, who had so little to remind them of home except traditions like roast lamb, could afford. It wasn’t until several years ago that we increased our price to $1.25 per pound live weight at the suggestion of our CPA. It followed the market price to $1.50 the next year and two years later to $2 per pound. Our lamb sales stayed steady. Obviously, our Bosnian friends were doing well in their new lives. Our lamb sales were finally covering the cost of feeding a ewe and raising her lambs.

This year, the first man who called for lamb told us that the stockyard price was $1.25 a pound in South Dakota. Dave said our price was $2 and politely suggested that he buy his lambs in South Dakota. The second man who called also said $2 per pound - $140 for a lamb roasted and eaten on a Sunday afternoon - was too expensive. In theory, I agreed with him. In practice, I need my lambs to bring in enough money to pay for their upkeep.

“If nobody buys them because they’re too expensive, we’ll have to sell them at the stockyards,” Dave said, “and who knows what the price will be then. I think we should sell them for $1.50 per pound.”

“We’re losing one quarter of our lamb income,” I said. “We sold all our lambs last year at $2 per pound. If we sell them all this year at $1.50 our income will be down 25%. You’d quit your job if they docked your pay 25%.”

It was a true statement, but hardly relevant. Selling lambs allows us to pay for the upkeep of our sheep. We “pay” ourselves nothing. If we dock our “pay” by 25% it doesn’t change a thing - 25% less than nothing is still nothing. However, the farm wouldn’t pay for itself in 2013.

Prices paid by farmers rarely go down. Farm prices fluctuate all over the place and the farmers have to absorb the difference. One of our successful business friends told us that lamb was a luxury and we should price it that way. If we drop our price by 25% we move from the luxury market into the commodities market, those necessities which are priced like milk and corn. Lamb isn’t like those commodities; the government won’t pay me a subsidy to make up for low prices.

Dave and I talked and talked over the problem. Neither of us could persuade the other.

We sold our first lambs to two of our oldest local customers, friends. Dave made the sale. They wouldn’t have complained about $2 per pound, but he only charged them $1.50. We couldn’t charge them $2 and then drop the price for the rest of our customers if the lambs didn’t sell. So this year, our price for lamb is $1.50 per pound. I feel like we have taken a giant step backward. Our farm on which we expend so much effort, so much time, so much money, looks like a hobby instead of a business, just because of the price of lamb.

Outside of the box

Our baler is essentially a box with attachments. Rolling pickups lift the dried alfalfa from the ground and feed it into a giant screw. The screw directs the alfalfa into a three sided box. When the box is full, a plunger compresses the hay, metal needles and knotters tie two strings around the firm rectangle, and then the plunger pushes a fifty pound bale of hay out the back of the box. Dave repairs the baler when necessary, but most of the work involved with baling takes place outside of the box.

Dave learned to bale from his grandfather fifty years ago. I learned from Dave thirty years ago. We begin baling as soon as the dew dries and put the hay in the barn in the late afternoon when the day is the hottest. For most of the years we've been farming, we have worked with three people building a load on the wagon, one person to drive the tractor and two on the wagon. Then we need three to four people working at the barn, one or two to unload the wagon and three or four in the barn stacking bales. It worked well as long as we had kids at home or friends of kids or kids of friends to help out.

In the last few years, Dave and I baled on our own, taking turns driving and building the load. We hired four Somali boys to help put the hay in the barn. This year Ramadan, the Islamic holy month, fell during baling. During that month, Muslims don't eat or drink anything between sunset and sunset. Dave feels that it's dangerous for the kids to be working in the ninety degree heat in our barn without drinking water so we were at a loss to find workers. A Somali friend asked if we could put the hay in the barn in the morning when it was still cool.

What a great idea. The only change we had to make was to cover the filled hay wagons with big plastic tarps every night in case of rain or heavy dew.

Our young workers were mostly ninth graders, slender and not used to hot, hard work. Ato helped me transfer bales from the wagon to the bale elevator that moves the bales into the barn. Usually, I either did it myself or had one of the boys drag the bales across the wagon so that I could load the elevator. Ato suggested that we lift each bale together. We each grabbed one twine with both hands, walked across the wagon and lifted the bale onto the elevator together. It was so much easier.

In three days, baling had changed. We could do things more easily and coolly just by thinking outside of the box.

Roundup

We have finished the spring lamb roundup. They are all weaned, vaccinated against over eating and internal parasites and “branded” with a dot of orange spray paint. The paint is a “just in case” measure. We lift each lamb over the fence after we give it its shots, but sometimes a lamb gets excited and jumps over the fence, or a big group of lambs run right through the fence and knock it down. Without the brands we wouldn’t know who had been done.

This year we also weighed each lamb to see if lambs born in April gain weight faster than lambs born in the cold of February. So far, it doesn’t look like we’ve learned anything useful. Single lambs gain weight faster than twins; twins gain faster than triplets and everybody gains faster than quadruplets. We already knew that. When the quads were born, we knew they’d still be tiny and too small to sell until well into 2014. But they are so much fun we don’t mind. I’ll have to sit down with my salesreceipts from last year to see how early we had 70 pound lambs and how fast the rest reached 70 pounds. As of last Friday, we had one 80# lamb, four 64 – 68 # lambs and a lot of 50# lambs.
We worm the moms first, giving each animal an orange bindi on their forehead after the shot. Then Dave picks up a lamb and hands it over the fence to me. We weigh it, give it two shots and spray a dot of orange on its tail. The lambs practically jump out of our arms to get away. When all the lambs have been marked, we enclose them in a corner of the barn and open the ewe’s pen. We chase the ewes out of the barn and through six pastures, hoping to keep them moving until they reach the farthest pasture from the barn without having any turn around and run back for their lambs. This year things went very well. The ewes all ended up in the far pasture and the lambs settled noisily into the home pasture. It will be several days before they stop calling for each other.

Weaning is hard on everybody. Dave and I each lift every lamb at least once. After they’ve been separated from their moms (by even a few feet) some of the lambs start to cry. Then their moms cry. Then of course, other lambs get upset because of all the crying and they start to cry, and their moms join the chorus. By the time we finish, our arms are weak, our ears are ringing, and our throats are sore from shouting to each other.

We will keep the moms and babies in separate pastures from now on. Even weeks later, if they get together, the babies start nursing again. Moms who are still producing milk very seldom get pregnant. So if we want to breed our sheep in October, we need to have a roundup and wean them in June.

Culture

One of our friends who raises strawberries and beef cattle mentioned that farming is more a life style choice than a livelihood. I think it’s also a culture and as such, has its own peculiarities.

It is a culture of appreciation for new lambs in the spring, for fences stretched taut and gates that are sound, and for fresh hay drying in the field under a cloudless sky. It is a culture of hope against the odds. If you cut too early, the alfalfa has a lot of water in it and dries too slowly and doesn’t come back as well. If you cut too late, the thistles in the fields are beginning to go to seed. If you cut at just the right time, it will still might rain or the machinery might break down. It is a culture of hard work. Each bale of hay weighs 50 pounds and we lift it at least three times to get it stacked in the barn.

Baling is always an interesting time of year.

Dave struggles to make sure that the machinery works – it’s old machinery.
He struggles to find helpers – we have several young friends in the Somali community in town and they round up three or four junior or senior high friends to help. But it is hard to depend on workers whose first language is not English and who have never done farm work before.
I struggle with cultural differences. When I work with Somali boys and men, they persist in trying to snatch every bale from the baler and stack it, leaving me with no job. I know that they think they are protecting me, but I don’t find it charming; I find it a pain in the neck. It is exhausting to build a load on a wagon by yourself. I want these guys to keep working for three or four wagon loads a day. I don’t want them exhausted too soon. The Somalis also have to learn to take orders from a woman. Until we get to know each other they tend to listen politely to what I tell them and then to continue doing things in their own way. If we were working in Somalia, in their hayfield, that would make sense. But we’re working in Minnesota in my hay field and I know what I’m talking about. They have to learn to follow my direction if they want to be invited back to help with baling next month. Of course, just like some of our American employees, they may not want to help bale the next crop of hay. We’ve had American kids and Somali kids work a few hours and suddenly remember they had other pressing previous commitments. We’ve had Somali kids and American kids work hour after hour, day after day, trying to learn what we’re teaching and working as hard as they can to get it right.

This summer, we have a young Somali man who comes to the farm to help after his college classes and his work study job are done and if his wife doesn’t need help with their children. Although he still has trouble letting me pick up a bale, he loves working on the farm.

Farming is indeed a lifestyle choice, a culture of sorts.

Old machinery

We have old machinery. I think of our tractor as new, because we bought it new – in 1985! We decided on a new tractor rather than an old one because the new ones have a wide wheel base in front as well as in back and because of that, are less apt to tip over. But from then on, we bought our machinery used, mostly at auctions.  I usually had Amber and Laurel with me. We’d look at the machine we needed and try to decide if it was in good shape (For me this was a challenge.  In the 1980’s I was able to use a socket wrench to tighten sparkplugs. I discovered that shifting the little lever back and forth for each crank made turning it much easier. It was frustrating though because the plugs didn’t tighten until Dave came over to see why I wasn’t making progress and explained that the lever is supposed to stay in one position for tightening and the opposite position for loosening). If the machinery looked good, We’d scan the wagons for interesting household items and things for the kids to bid on and then we’d stake out a piece of lawn or pasture, spread our blanket, get out books and toys and lunch and wait for whatever we were bidding on to come up. Once we bought a bale elevator, once several long extension ladders. Another time we came home with a hand cranked farrier’s forge and several auctions garnered us hay wagons.

I think all of our big machinery (three very old balers, two old haybines, an ancient chisel plow, a disc, a chopper and a windrow turner) we either bought from friends or found in ads in the newspaper.  Used machinery is good because the cost is much, much less than that of new machinery. Used machinery is bad because it needs more upkeep. A lot more. In fact, used machinery is more of a life style choice than an investment. If you’re really unlucky, the farmer is selling the piece because he can’t stand the thought of fixing it one more time.

Dave has learned to repair machinery – over and over and over. I can change tires and replace decking and structural supports on the hay wagons. I’m a specialist. Dave has to be a generalist and every year he proves his skill (gets by) on the haybine, the baler and the tractor. Every year, he has to learn something new. The people who ask us if we don’t find farming beneath us because we are so well educated have never tried it. A major part or our education is what we have learned (and continue to learn) about machinery and ourselves. Even more important is what we learn to appreciate, by farming. The value of old machinery is one of those things.