New Beginnings
WARNING: I want to warn those opening this post that there are images at the bottom of an animal giving birth. We did not post pictures throughout the blog as we normally do as we wanted to give a warning ahead of time. While we as farmers believe they are appropriate and part of the journey of being farmers and raising livestock we do understand that not everyone will. Thank You.
Last year we decided to enter into a new venture outside of produce. Lamb is not a commodity well served in our market area and we have wanted to add meat, outside of chicken, to our farm for sometime.
In early 2019 we purchased only two lambs unsure if we really wanted to add 4 legged livestock to the farm. We quickly figured out we loved having sheep and found ourselves with a small flock of 10 within a few months.
We were lucky and were able to find a local farmer that would contact us when he had available bottle lambs. He wasn’t up for bottle feeding and we had 3 eager kids who were…. and their mama may have been eager too.
Fast forward to June 2020 and we have a small, healthy, beautiful herd. The ewes are sweet and kind and come running when they hear the slightest rattle of the gate or grain bucket.
Matt had mentioned to me at the beginning of March that he thought our oldest ewe may be pregnant. We had not separated the buck from the heard at this point. While our buck does like to be a trouble maker on occasion he isn’t mean spirited and has done well remaining with ewes.
We watched as the oldest ewe, born in January 2019, became larger and two weeks ago we noticed her teets were quite swollen. Four days later Matt was doing our morning chores and happened to walk up just as the delivery of our first lamb on the farm began.
The first time mama did a beautiful job delivering her. We were amazed that it only took 45 minutes from seeing the tips of the lambs hooves being born, to her being fully delivered, to her standing and then nursing.
Less than 48 hours later and that little lamb is darting quickly around her mother, nursing like a champ and acting as if she has been a part of the herd the whole time.
We are excited with this new addition and what this means for our herd. We are hoping to have a second season of lambing this fall as the remaining ewes turn a year old this month. We will be slowly building the herd, making careful additions and selecting qualities that will bring our herd to where we desire.
In the meantime I will be enjoying the sweetness of this adorable little lamb and laughing at her quirky, spunky self as she runs and jumps in the pasture trying to entice the others to join in her fun.
