Fall again (duplicate post)

Well, it's definitely beginning to look a lot like fall again. The summer plants are dying out and the leaves are becoming more brittle. Tomorrow's high is once again predicted to be down in the low 60s and I love this stuff! I love the cool breeze in the morning, and I love being able to throw on some long sleeves and just wear them all day long without worrying about spiked heats. Fall colors are on the way and that means we needed to clear out our garden to make room for some mums.

I've included a picture today of the pumpkin plant we started at the beginning of the year. It's a perfect example of the shortage of bees and other pollinators, because this plant flowered all summer and went without any fruit. Not because it was sterile, but because I literally never saw anything crawl or fly by until it was already into late August. Luckily, our plants out at the parental unit were more successful. Jacob had a vastly successful planting of sweet corn after the first set was flooded out and our pumpkins are turning a good, solid Halloween orange.

County fair is coming up this coming weekend and I can't wait. Lambs and steers look good and it's a great time to have a fair. Look for me as press staff once again, pit passes and inside track for the horse races!!!

Piggies! (duplicate post)

I went out for my second visit to the farm where my project will be taking place, and it's all starting to seem just a little bit more real. Work with literature, designing, planning and the like can become so abstract and the chance to get hands on and take pictures and conceptualize where things will really be was pretty exciting. I went through the simple stuff such as claiming a locker to keep some things in, meeting the farm employees and designing the main ideas of how this is going down. Right now I'm still held up by people who haven't completed their animal handling training requirements so hopefully we will get a move on pretty soon.

We also dropped in to see the little piglets. If I had seen my first pigs as piglets, I think I would have a much more happy impression of pigs. They are so cute and little, almost fragile looking like Wilbur in Charlotte's Web. But little pigs grow up to be mean biters, cannibalistic towards their neighbors and aggressive towards anyone. And don't think that they were any better in the wild. Old Yeller might be a Disney movie but the vicious wild pigs in it are totally straight to character. Thankfully we found a solution for this, and it's called bacon.

Speaking of bacon, I helped with the Ohio Lamb Chef's Day this week and got to experience new twists on many old products. I love lamb for it's unique taste, whimsical rearing grounds (the definition of beautiful pasture was coined when someone saw lambs grazing), and for its ability to eat anything and turn it into food for me (best thing about ruminants). But I loved lamb even more after getting to eat it prepared by a master chef. And this chef wasn't just a master at preparing food, but a great guy to work with and help. He explained everything so simply and yet got such amazing results from relatively unskilled volunteers. Very impressive and my personal favorite from the day was lamb bacon. I will try and remember to take a picture and give a description of it when I fry up the leftovers that I have in our refrigerator now.

True Substance

Like everything in life, blogging is really difficult to do right, in that scratching below the surface to write something meaningful takes some deep digging, every day. To quote the English teacher on Easy A, "I don't know what it is with your generation's obsession with posting everything they do online, but I assure you, they're not all gems." It's easy to see why lots of people just don't make it in the blogging world, but I'm determined not to give up so easily. However, in an effort to really get to some hard stuff, some true soul searching as to my part in agriculture and why I wake up every day proud to associate myself with this industry, I'm going to have to refer to you. Ask me questions, the things you really want to know.

This past week marked the weaning season for us out on the Wenner Farm. Now, being a pretty small operation, this isn't as crazy as at some places, but the general ideas are the same. Sheep are ruminants and contrary to some opinions, they actually like to eat grain and forage, rather than milk-based products for all of life. As sheep get older, their stomach's other compartments begin to expand, converting them from the simple Abomasum (which handles milk) to the more complicated bacterial vat called the Rumen, with its associated cooperators, the Reticulum and Omasum. To facilitate this process which also leads to greater growth and a healthier life for the lamb, the mothers and us cooperate to introduce it to hay, and then feed. Once the lamb is eating enough, we separate it fully from the mother. This helps to dry off the mother so that she doesn't get mastitis and can recover from her pregnancy and lactation, as well as helps the lamb to focus on consuming the food which is best for it.

Of course, this separation leads to some anxiety between the ewes and their lambs, but not due to anything beyond an adjustment to the new system. Once the mothers have dried off we turn them out to pasture where they can start grazing on the brand new grass pushing its way up through the ground. It's a happy day when we get to turn the ewes loose to watch them prance around, excited to be turned out and running again. The excitement usually wears off in a day or two, but it's fun to watch until then. This sorting of the ewes also gives us an opportunity to evaluate all the ewes and determine which to keep for another breeding season and which to sell at market where other producers might pick them up, or they might end up in the food chain as mutton.

The lambs are kept indoors for more intensive observation because this is the critical part of their lives where they are growing and more susceptible to disease. Since we raise show lambs, for the most part, it's easier for us to decide which to keep and which to sell to other people when we find people who are interested. Of course, all of this will come later, as I update you as to what's going on at the farm. For now, it's weaning season and the ewes are starting to get turned out. Both us and them wish for some warmer weather as we sit through this abnormally low temperature Spring.

In spite of the weather

I know you hear all the time from so many vocal agriculturalists that farmers work 365 days a year, that they work in the ice and the heat, because time doesn't wait and growing food isn't something people have time to mess up. I can remember many a day where the thunderstorms rolled in and we were still cleaning cages or feeding the animals. It never mattered what the weather was like; we were always there.

Well, now that I'm back in the Columbus area again, I've been able to go out there a little more often. Amanda and I's ewe lambed twins, both healthy, and so I've been out there trying to help as the ewes transition into being mothers and then as the lambs need processed (not quite Mike Rowe style). That's what brought me out to the farm last week on a day which was better than some, but not most.


You can see from the picture the ice that covered the barnyard. Not only is this problematic for getting up the big, slick hill from the road (I made it only 12 feet and had to walk the rest) but this is also hard on the animals' joints if they were to be kept outside during the storm and hard on the people working to care for the animals. Without the extra kids around anymore, my little brother and my mom have so much more work to do on the average day by themselves.

But slipping around on the ice, chipping away at the frozen tanks and running the heat lamps to warm the lambs has its reward in the end; I wouldn't trade this for anything and while this year I'm not out there much, I put in my time, and I will again when this whole school thing is finally over. Leaning on the fence, looking down at all the frolicking lambs in the pens who will soon be turned out to pasture, I wouldn't rather be anywhere else.

Light at the end of Winter's Tunnel

It's finally February and I don't know about the rest of you but January seemed to both take forever and to filled with busy days from New Year's to yesterday. And just as the weather seemed to break and lighten up, and Betsy finally got to see the ground at our house for the first time since she's come home, we got the ice coating last night.

I think if there's one thing I hate about living in C. Ohio compared with my time spent at MSU, it's definitely the ice. Up there we got much more snow and I can deal with all the snow in the world just so long as I don't have to slide my way around the backyard or hammer at the car windshield trying to get the cracking/scraping process started.

Well, despite the wintry conditions, lambing is in full swing now out at the family farm. With 13 lambs down, we're about halfway through the process and these little bundles of joy are the inspirational reminder that winter really does have expiration date. Lots of people like to wait until spring to drop lambs, but with ours lambing indoors, we can afford to lamb early and it's days like today that I'm grateful for that. If the weather gets ugly tonight and meetings get cancelled, you'll find me out on the farm with my mom moving fencing as we prepare to welcome more lives into this world. Pictures to follow, but for now I've included one from a couple years ago.

Mike Rowe on castration

Nothing more needs said other than I think this is a great talk by Mike Rowe. Listen to it, and think about how it applies to the misconceptions that we have about what is really better for the animals. And who better to know what's good for animals than the ones who take care of them 365 days a year.