We have now dried off our last few ewes and have turned them back into the pasture with our two rams in order to ensure we maximize our efforts starting at the end of this year. All of our ewes, including our yearlings from last year's batch will start a new lambing cycle beginning October 6th (or there abouts). This time we will be going with the D1 procedure (meaning we will take the lambs from their mothers after 24 hours and raise them on formula/milk replacer) as this ensures a longer milking cycle and enables us to get the ewes starting at a high production level. We had found that the D30 technique wasn't as efficient as by that time some of the ewes had already started to slow in their production and could not produce as much milk as was expected.
The last few months have been spent doing a lot of research regarding markets for our milk.We still intend to make cheese with some of it, but we are in the process of finalizing our production procedures for another product. Once we have the graphics, etc in a first stage of completion I will reveal all. Suffice is to say this is a unique product on the market here so we have no competition.
Around the farm Will and I are beginning to remodel the old cow enclosures around the original cattle head gate. We have been using this corral to load the wethers into the trailer for the market and decided that with some work we could make it more useful on a day to day basis. In between the last spring rain showers all of the essential work has been done ready for the coming haying and we are pleased to see the farm at a point now where we are no longer catching up with maintenance and repairs but are seeing projects I had planned when we first got here starting to move forward. As I mentioned earlier we are going to be doing all of our haying ourselves this year. We're confident we can manage it and the benefit is that we keep all of the hay for ourselves and can make a bigger profit on what we don't need.
The other big news is that my mother is here for a three month holiday. I drove down to pick her up in San Francisco at the beginning of May. With the showery weather it's been tough getting the time to do things but now that appears to be breaking and we are making the most of the sunny weather. The above image is a sample of the beautiful Oregon landscape on the road out to Crater Lake.
In all things are going well at the moment, no mishaps or nightmare problems. Our six monthly inspection also happened at the end of April, and again we passed easily. In fact the field officer for the Dept of Ag brought along a small army of field reps from all over Oregon to see our operation, and despite the terrible weather, all were very impressed with what we had done.
Next weekend is the annual Lamb Show, a major event in our calendar, but we won't be showing any of our livestock, maybe next year. I'll be back with some pictures from the show next week.
