Well That's a Surprise!

Surprises, life is full of them. Sometimes surprises are great; like discovering $20 in your winter coat the first time you put it on for a new season, or finding eggs in a birds nest as you walk through a field. Other times surprises aren't so nice; like finding that predators have gotten into your chicken pen. We have a lot of surprises here on Hill Giant Farm, of both the "woohooo" and "oh crap" variety. This weekend, we had a very pleasant surprise.

On Saturday evening as we went to put our sheep in for the night we noticed that one of the ewes was hanging back all by herself. This isn't really typical behaviour so Randy went to investigate why. As he got closer to her he hollered "she's hanging back because she had a lamb." I thought I heard him wrong at first-we've been done lambing for about 6 weeks. But nope, I heard him correctly. Ewe 685 gave birth to a big, healthy, beautiful ewe lamb, in the middle of June. Both Mom and the lamb are doing well. Given the unexpectedness of her arrival, we have christened the lamb Surprise. She's awfully sweet and is blessed with a very good mama. Below are some pictures.

Surprise is a little shy at first (if you look you can see her little legs
 behind Mom). Here she is hiding behind her Mama.

Getting a little braver. But still sticking pretty close
to Mom.

Mom and Surprise share a tender moment as Surprise
stops for a drink.

FAQs About Shearing Sheep

Whenever people learn that Randy and I live on a sheep farm there are always a lot of questions. Do you shear your sheep? Why do you shear them? What do you do with the fleece? Do you raise your sheep for fleece or for meat? So, being as shearing has recently come and gone and our sheep are running around "naked" I thought I'd devote this post to answering these FAQs. If you have other questions that aren't addressed, please feel free to ask them in the comments section below.

The sheep wait to be shorn.

Do you shear your sheep? Why? The answer to the first question is yes, although not in a technical sense. In a technical sense we hire a very talented and personable shearer who comes in and does the actual shearing for us. Shearing is a very specialized skill that takes a long time to master (it takes about 10,000 sheep before they say you've really got the hang of it). On our end there is still lots of work associated with shearing. First we build a chute to get the sheep in a single file line, then we hook that chute up to the shearer's gate for easy access to the sheep on an individual basis. The chute is also connected to a holding pen so that they can't escape and are more easily guided into the chute for shearing. Once they are sheared the sheep are let out into a large pen to wait for the rest of the flock. Throughout this whole process the lambs are separated from their mothers, often for the first time, and it is REALLY noisy as they protest this short term arrangement. 

Sheep shearing.

The second stage of shearing is dealing with the fleece itself. The fleece is gathered up and taken to a sorting table where I and my helpers (this year a couple of adorable kids and my lovely aunt) pick all of the poop and straw and other debris off of the edges of the fleece. Once the fleece is picked clean it is rolled up like a big blanket and carried up a ladder to be dumped into an a-frame holding the giant wool bags. As the wool bag becomes full, I climb into it and jump on the fleece to compact it (it's really fluffy and bouncy) and then more fleece is added until the bag is jammed full. My heaviest bag packed so far was 254 lbs. The wool bag is then sewn shut and rolled out of the way. This year we had about 2.5 bags of fleece.

As for why we shear our sheep the simple answer is because it would be inhumane not to. Sheep have an internal temperature of 40 degrees Celsius, that is 2.3 degrees warmer than us as humans. They also carry on their backs in the form of fleece insulation that is so thick and so effective that in the winter snow collects on their coats and doesn't melt from their body heat. Now, imagine how hot and sticky and uncomfortable you are on a 30 degree day with high humidity. It's even worse for the sheep. Often by the middle of May the sheep are beginning to pant on warm days. Shearing is something we do for the well being of the sheep. It is done to keep them cool and to enable them to endure a summer living on pasture eating a healthy and natural diet.  

Our neighbour supervising.

Climbing up the A-frame.

Do you raise your sheep for fleece or for meat? Hear at Hill Giant Farm we raise our sheep for both, which makes them dual purpose, however, the fleece is very undervalued compared to the meat. Ewe lambs are kept for breeding and to continue and expand our flock, while ram lambs are sold on an individual basis to neighbours and friends to put in their freezers, or are shipped to the livestock market in Cookstown, On. If you're interested in being one of our lamb customers you can always email us at hillgiantfarm@gmail.com for more details and recipe ideas. 

What do you do with the fleece? Like many other industries the sheep industry has been hit by globalization. Within Canada there are very few places that you can sell fleece to and expect it to be processed within Canada. The price for fleece is also very low. Currently, we sell our fleece to the Old Mill in Blyth. Raising sheep for fleece in Canada would be a difficult way to make money. 

Nap time on the wool bag.

So that's the skinny on shearing sheep. Do you have other sheep related questions? Other farm questions? Go ahead and ask in the comments below and we'll make sure we answer them. 

Megan

The Butcher and the Bobolink: Randy's Thoughts on the Connectivity of All Things

The male bobolink can often be found resting on
 the tips of blades of grass.

This time of year is the time when we need to start cutting hay. There is a lot to be considered; weather forecast for 3-5 days, how tall the hay is, how much of the alfalfa and clover is in blossom, when will I have time, and finally have the ground nesting birds fledged their young. We have a lot of ground nesting birds, in particular we have a lot of bobolinks. Apparently, though its not evident at our place, the bobolink is a species at risk in the province of Ontario. They are a prairie bird that migrated to Ontario and naturalized after one of the greatest deforestation efforts in human history and the clearing of the Carolinian forest to make way for agriculture over the last 300 years.

As an ironic aside, the concept of deforestation for agriculture was only half followed through on Hill Giant Farm.

We recently learned through OSMA (Ontario Sheep Marketing Agency) that sheep farms now account for the majority of bobolink habitat in Ontario. This presents us with a paradox. We are asked to consider the birds when making haymaking decisions while at the same time being in a position of loss on the farm if our hay crop is poor or not big enough. If we don't have good quality hay we can't sustain the farm and by extension, we can't sustain and protect the bobolinks.

All of this has led Megan and I to discuss at great length the complexity of interconnections between things. I'm asked to protect the bobolink because they prefer my pasture while our neighbour, who feeds his dairy herd on corn silage, is not asked to
do anything at all as his method of farming makes his farm undesirable to ground nesting birds. The larger questions of why the bobolink is in trouble now in Ontario and why are they plentiful on sheep farms seem to be largely overlooked.

It's often the large systemic questions such as this that are overlooked. Why does poverty exist in certain areas more than in others? Why do so many people leave rural communities? Why do we forget to celebrate the simple things in life? Everything is connected. We need to ask what are we going to do about these problems in the here and now. But we also have to ask how and why things got this way. The bobolink and the local butcher provide a parable that shows this connectivity.

The sheep at Hill Giant Farm taking advantage of
pasture on the front lawn.

There was a farmer and for many years he kept cattle and sheep, chickens, a few pigs, an orchard and a garden. His cattle would graze in the pasture, his sheep would follow the cattle and finish grazing the field while the chickens and pigs would eat the by products of the kitchen and the garden. Keeping most of his land for pasture and hay, he would plant a field of grain per year. Natural habitat for birds and other small animals was plentiful. In the fullness of time he could sell his grain to the grist mill or the brewery and send his fattened steers and ram lambs, his pigs and chickens to the butcher who would in turn sell the meat. But what happens if we take the butcher out of this story? The farmer can still produce in this way but he can't sell his livestock, and therefore he can't make money, and therefore his method of farming must change. The further he has to drive to the butcher, the more he has to pay the butcher to cover costs incurred, the less profitable his farm becomes. Naturally, he is forced to make decisions, such as to downsize his herds and flocks leaving his pastures and hay fields unnecessary, and he plants more crops therefore removing valuable habitat for birds such as bobolinks. We see this kind of connection between everything all the time on the farm. Often these kinds of observations on connectivity are dismissed as being nostalgic or backwards, non-progressive, and that's a shame. If we thought more in terms of how what seems like one small thing (a bird) depends on other small things (a local butcher) we might find things starting to change in our society.

Where in your own life do you see two seemingly unrelated things being connected to one another? Share your observations with us in the comments section below.
Randy