Last Week in the Barn

Lambing is about 2/3 of the way through. Here are some photos from last week. It's hard to imagine the stormy weather that came in on Wednesday and Thursday after yesterday's warm sun.                  Farm Club members have come on some of the days to help with the endless chores. A favorite part of their day is Lamb Cuddling.                This is the first lamb born way back on February 22.                  Wednesday was quite a day with five sets of twins born. There was a Fibershed Ag Coop Board meeting at noon, but the representative photo for that would just be Stephany and me on the phone for two hours. But the main event was not lambing or the meeting. Ben Hostetler of Mountain Meadow Wool came to speak to a gathering of Fibershed producers and other interested people and talk about value-added processing and how to figure out cost effectiveness, etc.                   We also looked at fleeces and discussed skirting and cleanliness of fleeces to be sent to the mill. Oh, and do you see that stack of alfalfa in the background of the first photo of Ben and the group? I had made a call to say DO NOT bring hay on Wednesday because there would be a lot of people and a storm is coming. The hay showed up on Wednesday and Dan got about half of it in the barn before people arrived for Ben's talk.              Just before Ben's talk Trista lambed with a large lamb. I kept watching for a twin during the presentation but nothing happened.  I was also watching another ewe and towards the end of his talk decided to check the status of that ewe. She had been in the lambing area all day acting like she was going to lamb. I probably jumped the gun on this one, but it was partly because I wondered if there was a problem and partly because a few of us had planned to go out to dinner with Ben.

                       I ended up pulling twins and all was OK although in hindsight I'm sure that this ewe did not need intervention, just more time. In the meantime while I was dealing with that ewe Trista popped out another lamb. This was almost two hours after the first and it was such a tiny thing that I'm not sure she even noticed. She did not want that lamb--that's the small one in the photo under the heat lamp. By this time it was almost 6:00 and the rain was starting. A few of the people at the talk had stayed around to help. Dan and Ben brought the rest of the hay in under cover. I dealt with the cold, rejected lamb. I ended up tube feeding it colostrum because we could not get it up to suck even when we held Trista still. Ben and Dan helped with chores while Stephany went in to clean up the kitchen and order pizza and pasta to be delivered. That was really the best way to end the day because by then I didn't want to go out anyway.  More about that lamb in a later post.

        Skipping ahead to the next day. Petra was the only ewe to lamb on Thursday.

              Isadora is one of the ewes who had lambed on Wednesday. By the next day I was worried about mastitis. She has a lumpy uneven udder from previous mastitis and it seemed to get hard again. I spent some time massaging and using warm compresses (easy with hot water in a disposable diaper). She didn't developed mastitis so I think it was just the normal engorgement coupled with the hard, scarred areas from before that I was feeling.             Wednesday night through Thursday we had 1.8" of rain after almost no rain in all of February.

            That's all it takes for our place to look like this.