Over the past month, fifty-five of our ewes have lambed. There are a few more to go in this first batch, and then there are another fifty-five due at the end of April. Each ewe gets a number painted on her side when she gives birth. We paint the same number on her lambs, so if a lamb has a problem or escapes from its pen, it is easy to identify and reunite with its mother. The sheep and lambs are numbered in order, so the lamb below was from the 34th ewe to lamb this spring.

Our first group of ewes is in the barn and ready for lambing. The earliest due date was March 9. I think one lamb was born that day but it has been a slow start. The ewes are very pregnant so I'm sure a bunch of lambs will arrive while I'm up delivering meat to Rochester. Here is our first pairs of twins. Occasionally we use a heat lamp to warm the newest lambs on cold nights. Most lambs don't need the extra heat but it can help some of the weaker ones, especially when the te

I'm sure everyone is enjoying the warm weather this week. I know I am! The animals are too. There were lots of animals lying in the sun as we went around and fed today. Here I am pulling the twine off a large square bale of hay. They are a bit awkward to unwrap. It has to be done over the top of the feeder because once the twine is off the bale, it falls apart. Most round bales are easy to move with the tractor after unwrapping, but not the square bales. This cow is number 19

Hello and happy New Year!   Last week was weaning time on the farm. To wean calves, we run cattle through the corral and sort cows into one paddock and calves into another. The two paddocks are separated by a fence, so the cows and calves are only a few feet away from each other. This fenceline weaning technique is less stressful because the cows and calves can still see and hear each other. For a few days, the cows and calves spend a bunch of time at the fence calling each o

All through the winter, Ted—one of our hay suppliers—delivers a load of baleage bales each week. This baleage is a mix of grass and alfalfa hay, cut in May and early June near Cohocton, NY. It’s the highest-quality baleage that we feed, so we reserve it for our weaned calves and for the steers and heifers we are finishing.   Besides bringing a load of great hay, Ted is also very fun to talk with, so I always look forward to his weekly visits. The quality of our grass-fed beef

Every year after we finish cutting hay on our best hay field, we haul in a group of sheep to graze the field in October and November. The pasture on those twenty acres usually grows quite well in the fall and can keep sixty ewes happy and well-fed for sixty to seventy days.  While the ewes are grazing the hay field, we introduce a ram to breed the flock for a lambing season that will start in the middle of March. Feeding ewes an extra nutritious diet a few weeks prior to bree

I hope you are all enjoying the warm, dry weather this fall! Unfortunately, it has not been good for grass growth. In fact, we are currently experiencing moderate drought conditions in the northwestern part of Yates County. We generally supplement a bit of dry hay in October to increase fiber in the cow's diet when the grass is very lush. This year, due to the drought, baleage is making up more than half the cow's diet, and will soon be all their feed. When cows are grazing,

I hope everyone is enjoying this dry sunny weather! We are enjoying it here, but the grass wishes for more rain. Since early summer, the grass growth has slowed way down. We just fed our first bales of hay to help stretch the grass. Every day the cows and their calves need to eat around 1,600 pounds of dry feed. When we don’t have as much grass in the fields as we’d like, we can feed a bale of hay, which adds around 700 pounds of dry feed to their diet. Adding baled feed give

I hope everyone has been staying cool with these warm temperatures. The animals don't love the hot weather but we make sure they have plenty of fresh water and some shady places to rest during the hottest part of the day. Handling livestock safely and efficiently is an important job on the farm. It helps that our cows are calm and even tempered, and they are used to seeing Leith every day. It also helps that we have a well-designed corral. This picture shows the Bud Box, a si

After a slow start to the spring we were glad to finish our first hay cutting last month. As soon as we finish making hay, we spread 1 to 2 tons per acre of chicken manure on the hay fields. This replaces the nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium that are removed in each bale of hay and fed back to the cows on pasture over the winter. Chicken manure is very stinky, and it takes a long time to spread. On the upside, it is inexpensive and does great things for the soil. As a smal

Last week we were busy making some of our first-cutting hay, and we still have one field left to do. We need several sunny days in a row to cut hay and let it dry down to the right moisture level for baling, and our first window of good weather came last week. It has been years since we have made hay towards the end of June - last year we finished our first cutting on June second! This spring, the wet weather has delayed first cutting for farms across the region. When we cut

May is probably the busiest month on the farm. Our first group of ewes finished lambing last month, and they are grazing under solar panels up in Geneva. The second group is in the barn now. They'll move back out onto pasture when they finish lambing. Calving season has started, which means frequent checks of the cow herd. Most of the cows are quite capable of delivering their calves without any assistance, but sometimes a heifer needs help delivering her first calf. We keep