Sunday, April 1, 2018

Spring 2018

I haven't blogged in a while.  After two years of drought it was too hard to get motivated to do a blog.  The prospects for the coming year aren't a lot better, but we have gotten six inches of wet snow a week ago that measured about 0.60".  Right now the creek is flooding and the cows can't get across.  The snow melted in about a day, so the water rose fast.


I couldn't cross it this morning  to feed the cows.  But they come over to my side to be fed.  Then the water continued to rise, so they couldn't get back.

The water at the north creek crossing is even more impressive. The neighbor put this crossing in two years ago and it has never seen water.  It is a series of concrete slabs with two culverts to carry the water.  But now it is overflowing.


We lambed some ewes early in February.  Brooke the grand-daughter bought some registered Targhee ewes and we had a few that were bred early.  The lambs have been eating grain on their own and have been gaining good.  We weighed them a week ago.  We have purchased an electronic tagging system.  Every ewe and every lamb will have an electronic tag that is read with a reader.


The recorder scans the tag of the lamb.  Their birth date and weight is stored in the recorder, along with the mothers information.  Then we simply put the weight of the lamb into the recorder.


This particular lamb weighed 57.5 pounds.  You take the recorder and plug it into the computer and the computer computes average daily gain.  Used over time it will tell us which ewes are producing the better lambs and which ones don't produce as good a lamb.  We will be able to cull the herd accordingly.


These lambs are around 60 days old when we took the weight.  They are eating a lot of feed.  We mixed up a ton of feed the other day.  It should last them about 20 days.

Today we sorted of some ewes that Marshall had purchased last fall.  They will start lambing in a couple of weeks.  He can get them sheared and on a little better feed.  With the help of kids and dogs we run the ewes down the chute to sort them off.



With the added help Tammy was able to keep the sheep moving down the chute so Marshall could run the cutting gate.  It only took us less than half an hour to run all the sheep down the chute.  When you have good help and facilities it doesn't take long.


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