Cold Weather Lull

I hope everyone is enjoying the sunshine as much as we are! 

There is not much new going on at the farm. The ewe lambs are happy to be in the greenhouse for the winter. We separate the ewe lambs from the older ewes because the ewe lambs are still growing. In the greenhouse they get higher quality feed with less exposure to the elements. This helps them grow faster so they can be ready for lambing in May. They eat our very best baleage and some beet pellets for added energy.

Throughout the year I keep a mental list of the poorest parts of the pastures on the farm. These are the spots I like to feed a bunch of hay on in the winter. As you hopefully can see from the picture below, wherever hay is fed there is also a bunch of "fertilizer" left behind.

When the ground freezes, we try to feed cows on some of the hillsides to fertilize them. When the ground is wet, feeding on a hillside really erodes the soil, so we are limited to feeding on flat areas when it is wet like has been most of this winter. In a past newsletter, I mentioned we soil test the fields we feed on to see how we are improving the soil and to make sure we don't apply more nutrients than the soil and vegetation can capture. These practices build soil health and protect water quality.

We do have some exciting updates to our freezer capacity at the farm store. We recently installed a second walk in freezer directly behind the store to hold more meat, and we moved the old walk in freezer down next to the new one. This means we won't have to shuttle 50 pound boxes of meat down the hill to restock the farm store anymore.

Thanks for reading,

Leith, Mary Kate & Norah MacKenzie