We have made some decisions on our farm for the years to come. Saturday, Randy and I had to take 9 ram lambs to the sale barn to sell. It was hard for us to drop them off at the sale barn having some idea of what their future has in-store. By Sunday we had made the decision to buy a grain cart to store bulk grain in, buy more alfalfa than the previous year, and feed our lambs to butcher weight before taking them to the sale barn. In doing this we will eliminate the need for them to go to a feedlot and undergo the stress and cruelty these facilities tend to generate. We also backed out of taking our cull ewes (ewes that have bad udders on one or both sides or are sickly, in our case they just have bad udders and aren’t actually sick) to the sale barn and decided we would keep them indefinitely, buy 1-2 dairy goats in the spring and either graft baby lambs onto the goats to allow them to milk directly from the goat or milk the goats and feed their milk to the lambs via bottles to supplement our milk replacer and hopefully cut costs. We don’t want to be like the conventional farmers all around us. We want to raise our animals in the humanist way we financially can.
We hope to own more pasture land one day so we can subdivide and rotational graze to an even larger extent than we do now. In time we will hopefully be able to provide our own hay and grain or at least supplement our needs.
For now we will strive to make the changes we can to ensure our animals are healthy, happy, and with us as long as possible.
Although the irrigation systems are sucking us dry, chemical fertilizers are seeping through every piece of soil, and hunters are overrunning us, we hope to maintain a tiny piece of the earth where life is simple and kind and as pure as possible.
Hope everyone has a wonderful week!
A Simple Prairie Life 