And why we don’t have cats in our house all the time…
Shearing sheep has changed a bit on our farm. We used to have enough sheep shearers would come to our place and shear them with electric shears and then move on to mom and dad’s to shear their sheep. Then we didn’t have enough sheep for the shearers to come to us, so we had to load our sheep into a stock trailer and haul them an hour away to get sheared. We only did this once, it didn’t go great, so the following year we decided to try using the hand shears Randy shears the llamas with and hand shear all fifteen of our sheep. We borrowed a stanchion and went to work. It went so well last year we went for it again this year.
Our sheep are so tame this really works well for us. I also got in on the action shearing around their neck and face while Randy worked everywhere else which sped things up also.
It took us one weekend to hand shear all fifteen of our sheep and trim their hooves. It takes maybe 45 minutes a sheep. It’s a lot of work, but so worth it to keep them safe at home and not stress them in a trailer or have them walking through pens where other sheep have been.
Randy shears both of our llamas with hand shears in a custom chute we bought at an auction from a llama farm. We have two llamas that take about an hour each to shear and three at mom and dad’s.
We also shear the sheep at mom and dad’s. They have four, but two of them jumped the fence and were left with only two to shear. The two who jumped are hair sheep and will hopefully shed.
That is how our weekends have been spent lately. It’s good exercise and the animals enjoy when it is all over with as much as we do.
A Simple Prairie Life 