We are a Dairy!!

Finally all the hard work has paid off. At the beginning of this week we heard back from the Department of Agriculture regarding the milk sample we supplied them. It passed all the required tests easily and we are therefore now an official dairy. Although this part of the state was thick with dairies many years ago they have all since closed and we are now the only licensed dairy in Douglas County, and only the second current sheep dairy in Oregon.

This week we also had further enquiries regarding our milk, so come October when the lambing for this next season starts, we will have plenty of avenues for our milk.

Haying is all but done with just one last field to be baled. We should end up with around 300 bales which is a good 50 more than last year. The rain has finally stopped now and we should be in for a couple of months of fine clear skies. This weekend the dam goes in and as soon as the last hay bales are removed from the field I can start manure spreading. Busy time of the year, but in a month or so we will have the calm before the storm of lambing and milking.

Hey June.

With the weather finally breaking at the end of last week, we are now in the throes of haying. We have three fields to hay this year, the same ones we did last year but already it seems as though the grass in the top field is longer and thicker, meaning we should have a much higher yield than the 244 bales we managed last year. We'll be working in collaboration with our neighbor, the doctor. He will be using our cutter and our fluffer/rake and we will be using his round baler, although the smaller of the three fields will likely be done in square bales - the clover content is higher and the grass isn't as long, but the protein value looks better. Square bales are easier for me to feed the sheep with whereas the round bales are more along the lines of what people want to buy. Thankfully then we can produce both.

The inspectors from the Department of Ag returned on Tuesday and we now need only to supply them with a milk sample for our license. they'll be dropping by next Monday to pick up a sample, which means we have had to round up the 8-10 ewes that are still feeding their lambs and ensure they haven't fully dried up. This afternoon we milked them (and will do so once each day now so we can give the Dept Ag a milk sample) and were surprised at the volume we got. Even just a weeks worth of one milk session per day will provide us with several gallons of milk to make some more cheese in the coming weeks.

A couple of weeks ago we acquired a couple of pigs. They are both around 250 lbs so we are just putting a few more pounds on them before we have them slaughtered. Looking forward to lots of bacon, pork chops and a couple of good pork roasts. Marlowe can't understand why they don't fear him like the sheep do, and Byron just wants their ears!..

This weekend the last of the wethers will head to the scales and we will be left with our 70 ewes. We are also hoping that in between baling the back field we'll have time to paint the milk barn.

Forward into Summer

I can't believe it's been two months since my last post on the blog here. It's not like in that time we haven't been busy, far from it. In fact we are only a single step away from being a fully fledged licensed dairy. Several weeks ago we had the Dept of Ag Food and Safety people out here going over the facility with a fine tooth comb making sure that our facility was up to scratch and met all of the PMO (Pasteurized Milk Ordinance) guidelines. Along with the inspection came the news that we would likely be licensed within the month. Two very minor things needed fixing - the steps up from the milk room to the milking room needed sealing up the step wall and our milk urn into which the vacuum delivers the milk needed replacing with one that was PMO approved (which meant a high polish finish both inside and out). We sealed the steps the day after the inspectors left and our milk urn (Italian stainless steel) arrived at the beginning of the week. We now await the inspectors return and their granting of our license.

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.

One of 2009/2010's Success Stories

One of the big success stories we have had over the last few months has been the effectiveness of the FootVax vaccine we used in September 2009 for the inevitable hoof rot problems we were to encounter over the winter. In order to ensure there were no serious problems, we vaccinated half the flock in September and kept the other group as a control. All sheep who at the time were known to have had the problem were included in the vaccinated group.

During the winter months, when the foot rot bacteria are most prevalent, particularly so in this part of Oregon, we only had 3 sheep displaying problems. All three were jugged and their hooves treated and bandaged. All three were from the control group that were not vaccinated. For the last two hoof trims all of our sheep have been clear. Some feet are still a little scarred from earlier bouts, but all sheep are free and clear of hoof rot problems. For any sheep farmer this is a great victory, but more so for this part of the country where hoof rot is a significant problem with almost every shepherd we speak to experiencing it regularly.

On another good note we have just started our second lambing group. 3 lambs born at the end of last week and several ewes ready to pop. Everything else moves along fairly smoothly. Over the weekend the hay equipment was taken out of the storage shed and moved to the main barn. I'm replacing the blades on the disc mower but converting the old square baler from wire to twine isn't going to happen alas, the cost is just not worth it according to the local New Holland dealership where they do that. Cheaper just to buy a second hand twine one and use mine as a spare parts one. Have to think on that one as acquiring another would likely mean a trip into either Idaho or Washington as they are thin on the ground here in Oregon.

If the old beast can hold up, which there's no reason to believe she can't, then we will be doing our own haying this year. It will likely take us a while, but it's more profit for us. Square bales stack easier than round ones as well and are a lot easier to move around. At the very least I can cut the hay and rake it myself and get someone else in to bale if need be.

Our calf leaves us this week. She's 10 months old now and as big as her mother. We have sold her to the guy we buy our orchard grass/alfalfa from and got what we think is a very reasonable price for her.

On other miscellaneous news, yesterday we had engineers looking over the bridge outside once again. Apparently the design is now out for bid which means that we should have a new bridge going up in the next few months. Interesting times ahead on that.

A Milking Update

It has been two weeks since we started milking and so far everything has been running relatively smoothly. We seem to have got most of the routine down to a set time give or take a few minutes depending on how the sheep are behaving. We have a couple who are problem animals. They don't like being touched on the insides of their back legs so it makes moving their legs to clean their teats interesting to say the least. I've only been covered in iodine once, not bad really all things considered.

Over the weekend Will and I built a ramp from the main barn into the milking lane just in front of the actual entry to the milking barn. It means we have the ability to properly separate the two flocks of sheep without having to resort to pasture rotation acrobatics or the moving of sheep and the closing of multiple gates. Luring them in with pea pellets certainly help and they only need to do something a couple of times before they learn. That's one good thing about sheep, they're such good....sheep.

So we've been recording milk temperatures as well to make sure we comply with the PMO (Pasteurized Milk Ordinance) which is like the milk producers bible and is what we had to ensure all our construction plans adhered to when building. We are required to reduce the temperature to a certain level in a certain amount of time (50 F or 7 C or less within 2 hours of the completion of milking). We're freezing the milk, but a regular fridge/freezer or chest freezer doesn't have the capacity to lower the temperature fast enough, hence our purchase last year of the laboratory freezer.

On a personal level I am looking forward to the time when we can shear the sheep and the wet weather ends. Cleaning them at the moment before milking is the biggest chore.

This week we plan on starting to make some cheese finally. We're producing enough milk on a daily basis now so its just a question of exactly where we are going to go with the cheese. We have already got a list of maybe a dozen we are going to experiment with, but there are a core 3-4 we want to concentrate on. One of the lessons I have learned from other cheesemakers is that you should choose a small number to use as your starting point rather than trying to produce lots of different varieties. Only selecting a few means we can perfect the process quicker.

D-Day Arrives

Well today was an interesting day in more ways than one. But, at the end of the day we are happy to announce that everything was a success. Over the last few months we have done hundreds of calculations based on every possible variation in volume, dollar value for raw milk, laction periods, the whole nine yards. This is all done as well based on a 10/14 milking cycle. Oh the intricacies of running a dairy!

The volumes we got today are inside our minimum maximum window which means extrapolated out we will earn more than our minimum but less than our maximum assuming a price of $75 per hundred weight and the milking of 100 sheep. Of course we aren't milking that many ewes and won't be until next year at the earliest (we will have a maximum of 46 over the course of this year), but it does show that everything we have been working towards is rock solid.

Well my apologies if I have completely bored you or lost you dear reader, but this is a major step forward for us and we are very happy. For your viewing pleasure and patience here is another gratuitous lambiness photo.

T-1 and Counting

Tomorrow we start milking properly. By that I mean no more dry runs, practice runs, one sheep at a time runs or any other type of runs. Tomorrow it's 4 sheep, then the next 4 sheep until we're done and with each week from now until the end of the lambing we will be adding new ewes to the group once their lambs are 30 days old.

We have everything ready to go, we couldn't be more prepared if we tried. Last thing in place was a new stainless steel workbench for the milk room so we have somewhere to fill the bags for freezing. How much milk exactly we expect tomorrow is still something of an unknown variable and considering that volume is really what determines viability, it's hard not knowing. Sure we've done tests with single sheep, but they're all different, that's the factor that at the end of the season determines who we keep and who we say goodbye to. That's not the only factor for sure but it's a big one.

Lambing has been going well. We had one bad day last week where we lost 3 lambs. Their mother just wasn't feeding them andno matter how hard we tried, even down to feeding tubes in the stomachs, they just didn't have the will to live. All were incredibly small when they were born. Their mother's know by instinct, it's uncanny, the ones that won't survive get left. It's nature's way. It's still hard coming to terms with the fact that you just can't save some.

No problem with these little ones though, they are all at the stage now where they are running around like crazy.

So the time is coming. Tomorrow I should have a post reflecting on the first day of 'official' milking. Stay tuned!