Baymule
Herd Master
Both my freezers are frost free. With the vacuum seal, I have some meat that is 3 years old and still good. I even have my own vacuum sealer and it keeps fod good for a loooong time.
Teresa & Mike CHS - Our journal
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Mike CHS
Herd Master
We had T-Bones from the spring of 2018 a couple of days ago and they tasted as good as any we have had. Two of our freezers are frost free and they perform as good as the one that isn't. The technology has changed though and freezers don't get as high of a temp as they used to.
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Mike CHS
Herd Master
Depending on the weather tomorrow we are going to bring the main herd in to check out hooves and give shots and pull fecals on some. Overall I think we culled pretty good before breeding but we still have a couple that will be on the go list so we have slots for a couple of the upcoming lambing. It is supposed to be windy and wet early tomorrow but it looks like we can get them all in by late morning. Most are too close to lambing so what feet we work on will be with them standing rather than tipped in the chair. It will give us a chance to firm up the cull list at the same time.
Baymule
Herd Master
Sounds like a good day. How many ewes do y'all have now and how many are on the cull list?
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Mike CHS
Herd Master
The culls are the 3 that we thought about not breeding to start with so we need to stick with our instinct. Overall, what we kept for breeders are sound and as we hoped for. We have 30 breeders plus the bottle lamb girl that we will add to the herd when we pull Maxwell and put the wether in with him. She doesn't have the size we want but she gets a year to improve just because she is a spoiled brat and has figured out how to get animal crackers out of my jacket pocket. We are thinking about taking the numbers back down to where we were last year - but probably around 25.
Baymule
Herd Master
I have 10 ewes, culling one, adding 3 ewe lambs. I will probably wind up culling every ewe sired by that scroungy Dorper ram. Somewhere along the way, I'll buy a few registered ewes.
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Mike CHS
Herd Master
We had JMike available today so we made use of him to work all of the sheep in and of course it was pouring rain and windy with winds a steady 20-25 knots and gusting so I got soaked even with rain gear on. I moved the big dogs to the kennel while we worked and moved the two lambs out, then brought the herd in to the handling area. They haven't had any feed for two months but they still came in when I put some food in the troughs. It only took us a little under three hours to check condition, weight, pull fecals on about half of them and gave a dose of garlic to all of them. We only wormed 3 that had a low Famacha and we can bring them back in after scoring the samples. It is going to be a fairly long lambing this time around since they look like they are due anywhere from two weeks to probably as long as five weeks.
Today was the first time we had Maxwell in the chute but he did great so all the hands on time has paid off. In spite of being in with 31 ewes, his weight now is 187 pounds which is up from 165 when I brought him here from Missouri.
Today was the first time we had Maxwell in the chute but he did great so all the hands on time has paid off. In spite of being in with 31 ewes, his weight now is 187 pounds which is up from 165 when I brought him here from Missouri.
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Mike CHS
Herd Master
It turned out that none of the ewes that got wormer yesterday needed it. We still use the Famacha method to get a ballpark thought about our sheeps condition but it has proven to be unreliable more often than not. It has allowed us though to catch a critter that is over loaded with parasites that was in otherwise good looking condition. Since we have Barber Pole worms here we will continue to use it though.
Baymule
Herd Master
The best thing that ever happened to my sheep was Teresa teaching me to run fecals. FAMACHA is better than nothing, but fecals don’t lie.
We have two beautiful sunny days, but keeping grand daughters and littlest has fever off and on, so can’t go outside. They are drawing with Papaw right now, oldest made cookies. Later I’ll entertain the littles by making pizza dough and letting them decorate their own pizzas.
I would have been happy to trade you my sunshine for your rain. In the last 8 days we got 5” of much needed rain. The rye grass and clovers finally started growing!
We have two beautiful sunny days, but keeping grand daughters and littlest has fever off and on, so can’t go outside. They are drawing with Papaw right now, oldest made cookies. Later I’ll entertain the littles by making pizza dough and letting them decorate their own pizzas.
I would have been happy to trade you my sunshine for your rain. In the last 8 days we got 5” of much needed rain. The rye grass and clovers finally started growing!
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Mike CHS
Herd Master
We have gotten 5" twice in the last week and 3" in another but I'm not griping. I started to buy some mud boots that weren't quite as high as the ones I originally had but lately I have been needing the taller ones.
