First 2016 Farm Day

Farm Club met yesterday with the main task of replacing all the missing ear tags so that the ewes are easily identifiable at Shearing Day coming up in two weeks. There were plenty of other tasks too, but I don't have photos of much since I was too busy to get the camera out. First there was the surprise lamb! See the link for that story.

Dona took this photo of all of us as we stopped for a group photo in the barn.This is Jade sporting her new eartag. The ewe lambs' small tags were replaced with their grown-up tags. I decided to start color coding again. All the 2015 lambs have orange. There were also a lot of adult sheep whose ear tags were missing, so we replaced those.We got son, Chris to the barn to take a group shot so Dona could be in it too.We finished up at the ram pen. I took fleece samples to send in for micron testing.Time to relax in the shop......and enjoy donuts that Mary brought to celebrate Dona's birthday last week.

Rams...

...wouldn't life be peaceful without them? The rams were giving me so much trouble with the fence in the pen I'd used for years that we switched them to a new space about six weeks ago. It's been working OK but now breeding season is upon us and they are getting harder to deal with. Welded wire panels alone are not enough. Here is what happens when ewes flaunt themselves just across the fence. Not only are the rams ruining the panels, but the electric fence on the ewe side is immediately grounded out and that means that all the electric fence on that system is out. Dan had an idea that would hopefully solve the problem for the short-term in the areas where the rams were pushing on their fence and bending the t-posts.He put in extra posts that we happened to have around and welded rebar between the posts on the two sets of fences to help make things sturdier. We hoped that it would make the whole thing more secure.

Here is what Ginny thought when she noticed the welder in the corral.

 There was a shirt hanging off of it so maybe she thought it was a short person.

Lots of reinforcement should keep them from pushing those t-posts over, right?Fence posts look good. The wire, not so much. He was completely stuck in the welded wire and the high tensile wire. This is Alex, by the way, whose horn I just trimmed in the last post.

 The only way to get Alex out of this was to cut the welded wire panel in two places. Now I have the ewes completely separated, but that isn't a long-term solution. Unfortunately I don't have a big enough place to have the rams in a pen that is isolated from everyone else so we'll be moving to Plan C when we have time (that would be when Dan has time).