Wednesday, March 25, 2020

I have almost quit blogging but, out of boredom maybe I will start again.  We are sort of busy lambing the yearling ewes right now.  Mostly singles and they are lambing slow, five or six lamb a day.  When the bunch of old ewes lamb in a month we could get 40 new mothers a day with mostly twin births.  Marshall sheared most of these that are lambing a couple of weeks ago.  He got a guy to help him that came out of retirement.  Marshall got over a hundred and the guy got 49.

This is a file photo.  I have a new phone and it doesn't bring all the pictures to the computer.  My old phone just did  it.  I don't know how to make this one work that way.

We were going to get a professor from North Dakota State at Hettinger to come down with their wool analysing machine to come down and do our whole herd.  He would take a sample of wool from each sheep and put it in the machine and it would spit out about six different numbers of the wool sample.  A micron number, a comfort factor, staple length, curvature factor and some other I don't know what they mean.  They NDSU has a travel ban on now.  Plus if he leaves Hettinger he is an EMT and would have to be quarentined for two weeks when he got back.  Also in most rural areas there is a shortage of EMTs.

We went to town for groceries on March 9.  Tammy bought like almost $300 of groceries.  They had everything we needed.  Flour, bread, toilet paper and all.  Then all hell seams to have broke loose.  We have stayed home and listened to the TV and social media.  She thought we should go for another run two weeks later March 22.  So we went early in the day, which for us is like 11 AM.  We have to do chores and get ready.  No potatoes, macaroni and noodles were picked over, tp gone,  no flour, meat case seemed to be pretty full.  lots of milk and eggs.  Only peanut butter was extra chunkie.  Some shelves were empty and I didn't know what they are out of.  Another $300 dollar trip.  Might be a while for we go back.

Two weeks from today we will shear the rest of the sheep and then start lambing them a couple of weeks after that. Wool has been a good price the last several years.  This year we were told earlier the starting price would be 25% less than a year ago.  The wool market is tied to the Austrailian wool clip.  So the Austrailian dollar set the price and It has fell this last week about 15% compaired to our dollar.

The cattle markets are so upset nobody is really selling or buying till things settle down.  Several auction barns in South Dakota canceled their sales.

I guess I will leave with a picture from last summer.  Sheep in the sweet clover.



1 comment:

  1. Welcome back "western SD rancher". Thanks for the photos from the prairie and livestock news.

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