The Irrigation Jigsaw Puzzle

With the end of the haying for this year we are back into laying out the irrigation system. Last year, being our first experience, there were several issues that required major work, from buying a new 5HP pump to determining the best layout of pipes to irrigate maximum land. All that took time and unfortunately because of that and other tasks we were undertaking at the time we were unable to get a second hay cutting on any of our fields. This year things will be different.

Last year we had someone helping us hay, this year we had the same person, but next year we are planning on doing the whole thing ourselves. I bailed the front field using our old New Holland Hayliner, and after a few disasterous results we managed to get a good yield of 110 bales. The irrigation is now on that field so we will get another cutting come late August I am hoping and if the weather is good a third is not out of the question.

Beyond that we have 2 other fields that are being worked on. Moving the 5HP pump to the river side and connecting up the 6" mainline we will be able to irrigate both of them. The smaller will hopefully net us about 200 square bales in a second cutting. All of this is good news because our actual hay consumption in winter is small, meaning that all of the hay we have just cut can be sold - which amounts to about 120 round bales (that sell for about $20 each). As I mentioned because of the lack of rain this year during spring, this season will be a lean one for hay so we will keep ours undercover for a few months and anticipate the price going up.

In order to get a lot of the work done around the place - work that requires two men, I have found myself a farmhand for one day a week. He's been helping now for a couple of weeks and we've already made spectacular progress rebuilding a couple of our fences. I'm hoping that by winter we will have done most of the renovation work around the farm, from the fencing to reseeding a couple of the fields (they're full of foxtail, but that's another story!).

One important piece of news, our cow finally had her calf, a heifer, and she's very sweet. she's already bigger than the ewes so even at 2 weeks of age she's bossing them around.

In a weeks time we put our ram in with the lambs we got last year. They are now about 20 months of age so ready to start producing. This means that we will be lambing in November and then again next March/April. We have a dozen that will lamb at the end of the year assuming all goes well and this will be a good lead into a full milking schedule for next year. By April we will have ironed out all our issues and will be milking around 50 ewes.

We are waiting on the contractor to give us a start date on the renovation of the milk barn. after going through the new plans, the renovation plans and various permutations, we have a list of what needs doing and what needs buying. The hard work there will also be done by the time we lamb/milk in November.

Note: Someone requested more pictures, so I will attempt to add more in each post.

Summer is on its way, at last.

It's been an odd Spring. It has been a lot dryer than normal, and all of the rainfall figures for Douglas County from January to April are at about 2/3 of the average. What that translates to is a leaner hay season, which started a couple of weeks ago for most people on Memorial Day weekend. Ours started last week, earlier than last year but a sudden thunderstorm stopped everything in its tracks. The ground has dried at last and we're back in the swing of things.

The lambs are all doing very well, most are over the 50lb threshold now and the earliest ones are looking almost as big as last years yearlings. they're all on pasture now and have been for over a month, which has enabled us to determine our hay usage over the winter and so we know from the cut happening now how much we will need for the winter ahead. The rest can be sold, and if we can get a second cutting from at least 2 of the fields we should make a decent profit, at least enough to get the hay equipment we own working 100% so we can do our own hay next year and take all the profits.

With the lagoon in place we have an extra 40,000 gallons of 'water' that we can use for irrigation, with the added bonus that it has manure in it which is great for fertilizing the grass. Once the haying is done we will begin irrigating, and hopefully will get a second cut in late September.

The ewes were all shorn last week and we are about to turn them all into the neighbours fields for a couple of months once he has removed his hay. That will take the pressure off our pastures and allow us to do some serious fencing work, making some of the larger pastures smaller to aid in flock rotation.

Late last month we had some Arizona friends stay with us for just over a week. We had been feeling jaded because of the work we still have ahead of us but they picked us up and have given us a new perspective. The rebuild plans for the milk barn have halted, the quotes we received were a little higher than we had anticipated, even in the economic climate we're in, so we are moving ahead slower than we originally anticipated, but that is good in some degree because we are not feeling out of our depth, as we had felt now and then before. The milk barn has been gutted and over the summer months Jen and I will try and renovate as much as we can ourselves.

We have some new ideas we are looking into, thanks to our Arizona friends, including selling raw mutton from our culls as dog food. Looking at the prices around it should be more profitable than just sending them to slaughter.

At the moment we are handicapped by the fact our Bobcat isn't working. Once its back in one piece and the haying is done and the irrigation is running, I have to use the manure spreader to spread about 3-4 tons of solid manure across our 50 acres. That should be fun! Actually its not that hard a job, it just takes time, like everything.

We are also about to turn our young unproven ram in with about a dozen yearlings so we have some lambs in Autumn. these ewes will hopefully be the first small group that we milk on a regular basis. as I mentioned, moving slower is a lot more comfortable.

Urbanites Opting for Simpler Lifestyle

Over the last few days (thanks to a USA Today article) I have taken the time to notice that there seems to be a lot of movement of urbanites like ourselves back to the land. While most seem to have been forced as a result of the economic collapse that now seems to be happening pretty much right across the globe, this surely is a good thing. All of the blogs, articles and even Facebook pages that I have been going through are filled with people that despite some rude shocks and a general unpreparedness for their new lifestyle are actually happier, and more balanced people for having made the change.

As I have mentioned before I have urbanite friends in Canada who want nothing more than to be able to buy a couple of hundred acres, build themselves a green home, and raise livestock. They are like a lot of others I am reading about - those who at present are unable to move and so are turning their once dormant back yards into vegetable producing gardens. Even in the UK it seems this revolution is happening with companies reporting enormous increases in seed sales.

Will it last? That's certainly an interesting question. Once economic stability arrives, will these people return to their urban roots and take up where they left off? I don't think so personally. I think that over time the growing trend will be to ruralization rather than urbanization. With the availability of mass communication and the internet these days there is no general need for the average person to be forced into the concrete jungles. All of the people I am reading about have everything they need and are living a more satisfying existence on sustainable plots of land. I know it's not for all of you, you're more than happy in the urban sprawl, and that's just fine as well.

I'd like to show my support for those people who have shown the courage (whether through economic necessity or not) to return to the land and a more satisfying way of life and for anyone out there interested in looking into it, take a look at some of these links:

Self-Sufficiency and Homesteading
Homestead.org
Mother Earth News
The Simple Living Network

When the Catesby Farms website is eventually launched (and yes I know that's been coming for months now), I'd like to include a small section on sustainable living, based of course on our own experiences. Maybe it will give you a better insight into how we are doing this, and maybe, just maybe it might tempt you to look further into it yourself.

Construction Time Again

Things have been busy with engineers, contractors and friends all doing their part for the Milk Barn project in the last couple of weeks. We have just had all of the original milking stanchions for the 6x6 herringbone cut out and the room is now empty apart from the pit in the middle. We have had various quotes for everything from a complete knock-down and rebuild to a renovation and a refit.

So, in the next couple of weeks we hope to have workers on-site renovating the Milk Barn and turning it back into a milking facility once again. Once that is done we will definitely feel as though we are getting somewhere. We have been looking at various milking systems and are having DeLaval come down from Salem to talk to us in the next few days. I am also in the process of talking to potential buyers of our milk. Initially we will not be able to use all we produce in our first foray into actual raw milk cheesemaking and as the flock grows next year and into 2011 (we are now aiming for 150 ewes) we will have a large surplus of milk that we will need to market. For the time being we want to get comfortable with the milking process in conjunction with the animal husbandry. Jumping into everything at once is never a good idea. Our initial figure projections show that milking 50 ewes next year will turn us a small profit and that we should be able to increase the flock to 100 ewes and then 150.

We realized we were overly ambitious with our initial plans considering there was so much to learn with regard to sheep management, animal husbandry, milking and of course cheesemaking. The first two are an on-going thing and you are always learning something new, the last one is a rewarding process but in order to be successful at it you need to know the three steps before it, and so milking is next.

The lambs are doing extremely well and all are putting on weight and looking very healthy. The differences between the three breeds is now starting to become more evident in their little faces and soon we will be starting to wean them. In the coming weeks we have the haying to look forward to as well. The rain and the warm weather that has started to grace us has kicked the growth season off and it's hard to believe that we only have another 6 weeks before we're haying again. The warm weather will be a welcome break from the particularly wet few months we have just had and will give us the opportunity to finish the vegetable planting for this year.

Final Lamb Count

The final lamb for the season was born this afternoon (barring any unforseen circumstances). The final breakdown has been as follows:

29 Rams
17 Ewes

With 27 ewes giving birth, we lambed at 170% which is better than the 150% from last year. Unfortunately we lost 5 lambs, meaning our survival rate is 87% (slightly better than the average 85%). We had one set of triplets, 16 sets of twins (10 mixed, 5 all male and 1 all female) and 11 single births.

In all it was a fascinating experience yet again in which we learnt more than we could have hoped particularly assisting in several deliveries. We were slightly disappointed that the ram to ewe ratio was 2:1, but there are things we can try next season with regard to diet to hopefully alter that. We did get our 15 ewes which was what I wanted though.

Now we begin the task of deciding who we keep and who we cull. Unfortunately sentimentality only goes so far.

One of Life's Little Coincidences

We had 2 ewes lamb today. One was anticipated, the other was completely unexpected. The first, the anticipated one, delivered this morning fairly easily, the second, totally unexpectedly delivered this evening thanks to some handy work by the local vet (Dr. Barry Downie from Bailey Vet here in Roseburg). Being a yearling and with a lamb in the wrong position, it had got part way out and couldn't get any further. I thought it was dead having spent almost 30 minutes trying to pull it. It's head had swelled, its eyes were bulging and its tongue was swollen and protruding from the mouth. I thought I saw a couple of signs of life before the vet arrived, but even he at first thought it wasn't going to make it. Anyway, it did. It's shoulder had locked and that's why it wouldn't budge. It was a rather harrowing entrance to the world for a small lamb.

The coincidence is quite fascinating. Last year my daughters named a set of twins - one called Mint and the other Bambi - they were the first twins whose birth we experienced after we arrived here. In fact here is the first picture of them on the day they were born.

It was Mint and Bambi that lambed today, hours apart from each other, both giving birth to boys. Sometimes life throws real curve balls at you.

Sunny Days Are Here Again

I let the sheep and the lambs out into the far paddock today, having spent the day ensuring that all the little holes in the fenceline had been effectively repaired. I needed to install a gate betwen that field and the very back one (it only has wire fencing and not anti-sheep stuff so we can't let them graze there although I am looking to fence some of it off because the grass at the front is really good quality).

The little lamb rejected by his mother is now with the rest of the flock and as you can see from the picture he has mastered the art of self-feeding finally which means no late night or early morning feeds from me!

This week we finally begin the task of finding contractors to renovatethe milking barn and turn it into a cheesemaking facility. We'd like them to start around the beginning of next month so that everything is ready to go by May/June.