Getting Fleeced

So recently we've begun a new venture at Hill Giant Farm. Our friend Anna, of Anna's Custom Yarn Barn (https://www.facebook.com/CustomYarnBarn) asked if it would be possible to order some roving from us. For those of you who don't know, roving is the step in fleece production before it is finally spun into thread or yarn. Because we have approx. 500 lbs of raw fleece in our barn, as we speak, we said "Sure." The next step was to set about figuring out how to make it happen. Thankfully, we know a very talented and helpful woman who has been working with textiles, including wool, for a long time. After some instruction from her, we set out on our own.

The first thing you need to know about fleece when it comes off the sheep is that the outside is as dirty as wherever the sheep has last been. We sheared our sheep on a rainy day at the end of May, so needless to say, they were muddy. Also, sheep produce a natural oil called lanolin which is used in handcreams, soaps, shoe polish-you get the idea. Lanolin is what keeps the fleece waterproof and the sheep dry. By the end of a day handling the fleece your hands are really soft. If you happen to wear leather boots/shoes when you jump in the wool bag, they get a good polish and waterproofing. So our first step was to wash the fleece in order to remove as much dirt and lanolin as possible. To do this you need lots of really hot water and dishsoap. So, naturally, we fired up the turkey deep fryer and filled the pot with water. Once the water reached 200 Fahrenheit we poured it onto the fleece (covered in soap), stirred it to get everything wet and let it soak. We did this about 6 times per 64L bucket of fleece. Some people do this step in their washing machine but we weren't ready to risk the well being of our new front loading washer.

Heating the water.

Unwashed fleece.

Ikea bed frames come in handy. Drying fleece.

Having washed the fleece the next step was to dry it. To do this we spread the fleece out on what we believe to be an old Ikea wooden bed frame that was left here by the previous owner. We also used this same bed frame on shearing day to throw the fleece New Zealand style. The frame propped up on sawhorses gave lots of room to spread out the fleece and allowed for good air flow to help dry it. Point of interest, it takes 3 days to dry fleece when the humidity is 85%, and only 12 hours when the humidity is 10%.

The drum carder with a layer of fleece.

The next step would be to pick the fleece, which is just taking the fleece and pulling the clumps apart. There are machines that will do this for you, but we don't have one so we did it by hand. Once the fleece is picked you can begin carding it. Our friend kindly arranged for us to borrow a drum carder from the local spinners and weavers guild. It fits nicely on a table top and is hand cranked. You begin by taking the picked fleece, in small sections, and placing it into the feeder tray. There are two drums that rotate in opposite directions. On the drums are lots of small metal tines that grab and comb the fleece. The fleece then builds up around the second drum. When the second drum gets full you take the doffer (a long metal stick with a handle) and carefully remove your fleece batten rolling the drum in the opposite direction. The only difference between batting and roving is the width of the piece of processed fleece. Roving is more of a narrow piece for spinning into wool, whereas the batten is wider and used for insulation in quilts and clothes. Batten can also be steamed together to make felt.

Clean and soft batten.

It's pretty neat to be able to say that we can take fleece off of sheep born and raised on our farm and turn it into a new product. It gives us a new appreciation for the amount of work that people used to have to go to in order to cloth themselves. It has taken us days to process a very small amount of fleece and we would still have to spin it and then knit it to make just one pair of mittens. Makes you think.

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

Field Behind the Plow

"Watch the field behind the plow turn to straight, dark rows

Feel the trickle in your clothes, blow the dust cake from your nose

Hear the tractor's steady roar, Oh you can't stop now

There's a quarter section more or less to go" Stan Rogers, Field Behind the Plow

Today the weather was very good and I was finally able to start plowing. A couple of years ago I picked up a great plow at an auction. It was exactly what I needed, but I didn't go to the auction looking for a plow. What I went for was a haybine. I was the only bidder on our plow and got a great deal as a result. Part of the reason why I got a great deal is that plowing is going out of fashion in agriculture. Major cash croppers have all moved into what is known as no till farming, and may run a set of discs over corn stubble, but that's it. If they do plow, its usually with a very big 5 or 6 furrow plow. Ours is a 3 furrow plow- its in between a competition sized or a full scale production sized plow. Plowing competitions are quite a serious business, but I'll never enter one. All I care about is that what starts as turf ends up as dirt. 

Our plow is a 3 furrow Overum auto-reset plow. It was made in Sweden. The Scandinavians design their plows differently than North American companies and I feel their design is superior. What is most notable is that they have longer mould boards (the part that turns the turf over so that the grass is buried and the roots are exposed to the air). Longer mould boards means that  as you plow it is more like you are folding the dirt over instead of breaking it up. The other major advantage is that the  Scandinaian plows are auto reset, which in our case means it has pneumatic cylinders so that when the plow hits a rock, instead of getting caught and pulling back on the tractor (which can be dangerous) the pneumatic cylinder compresses allowing the plow to skip over the rock and then slam back into the furrow, all in the blink of an eye. This is very important at Hill Giant farm because we have lots of rocks. In fact, they're our only guaranteed crop. 

Today I was plowing 7 acres at our neighbors place. Most of his land is mature reforested pine or low lying wetland. But the 7 acres he has is comparatively flat to our place and remarkably free of stones (a rarity in northern Grey County). Lots of farm land around our place is rented and worked by 2 big cash crop operations or by a multi-generation dairy operation. No one is interested in working up only 7 acres. So, in exchange for letting him hunt on our land, I get 7 more acres to work up. The reason we still plow is because we are going to work this field up in 2012 and won't need to work it up again for 10 years. I cut hay off this field this year and it was patchy and weedy. If I plow the field now and let the frost and winter kill the existing roots in the spring I can disc-harrow, spread manure, and sow grain and hay.  The grain will grow and provide cover for the grasses and legumes which make up the hay.  When it is time to harvest the grain there will be some hay in the straw which the sheep will pick out and eat.  Two years from now the hay that was planted the year before will be well established and be cut dried and baled up.  

On our farm we add grazing animals to the rotation.  The sheep graze a field for years and fertilize it, then I plow it up and sow it with grain and hay, cut hay for years, then its back to sheep grazing.  

Here is a video.  Remember, I am still new at this.

We're Still Here

Well, it has unintentionally been a while since the last post from Hill Giant Farm. But don't worry we're still here! September was a really hectic month-back to school, additional chores wrapping up the summer, computer problems.....lots of things to distract us from blogging :) So, here's a bit of an update on what's happening at our place:

Lamb/Sheep Update: So far this year we have secured 12 lamb orders and they are due to go to the butcher on October 30 for butchering on October 31. Guess they'll be getting a trick more than a treat! This years lambs seem to be putting on more weight than last years, so that's good news for us and for our customers. We also decided to leave the mature rams in with the ewes all summer this year so we will have earlier lambing in 2013, likely late January to mid-February. This is a new experience for us but we're excited about it.

Chicken Update: The "little birds" (this years chicks) have been pretty stressful in September. You can shoot raccoons, you can  fill in holes to keep out weasels and skunks, but it sure is hard to prevent aerial predation. We lost a few chickens to the goss hawk that built her nest in the nearby county forest. Frustrating, and as a result we made the philosophical decision that for the overall health of the little birds we would stop letting them out on pasture to eat freely what they like and would start feeding them inside again. They're doing much better inside and are showing less signs of stress.

Frank: Our duck Frank seems to be doing pretty well. There has been much discussion among the Grey County relatives as to the sex of Frank. The matriarch of the Grey County family believes that Frank is a drake (male) based on the way its tail feathers display themselves (turned up instead of flat), while the oldest uncle in the family believes Frank is a duck (female) based on the same trait. Only time will tell as Frank will either lay eggs or not.

Kittens: Our mother cat and her remaining 3 kittens moved outside in September. Since then, the tom cat kitten has moved on and so has the mother cat. However, two of the kittens-Flopsy and Mopsy- have moved into the barn. We've noticed a great benefit from having the cats around this year; no rodents when we mucked out the sheep pen. That's a first!

As for us people at Hill Giant Farm, well, we just keep on plugging away. We enjoyed a 5 day vacation to the States with our Lambton County family. A fabulous couple farm sat for us and it was great to get away together. Well, that's all for now. Check back on Monday for a yummy recipe.

Wildcard Wednesday: Transition Network

On Monday we set out on what we thought would be a quick trip to pick up a 10 stall nesting box for our chickens. Little did we know that we were picking it up at a full fledged rare breed poultry breeding farm (there were birds and poop everywhere. M's Dad would have hated it!) We found the box on Kijiji, and as seems to often be the case, once we were there we found we had a lot of common interests with the farmer selling the boxes to us.
Over time, the conversation which began with lots of advice on how to raise poultry and recommendations about breeds etc., turned to discussion of bigger issues such as the inability to locally sustain small farms, difficulties around processing livestock on small numbers, the globalisation and industrialisation of farming,and where the future might take us as North Americans. In this discussion (frequently interrupted by turkeys trying to climb into our truck! They were really persistent!) we were introduced to the Transition Network, and in particular, Transition Meaford. We're still reading about them and learning what they're all about, so it's too soon to say what our involvement with them might or might not be.  It looks like they are trying to plan ahead for a time when our current lifestyle- heavily reliant on oil to get us where we need to go, and to get most of what we eat and drink to our tables, becomes unfeesible or unsustainable. The Transition Network seems to be trying to come up with solutions to these sorts of problems and to implement policies and structures that will ease that transition. That makes sense to us.
On the Transition Meaford business card we were given, they asked some great questions. Below are two that we'd love to hear your opinion on. Each person who responds will have their name entered into a contest for a great Hill Giant prize.

1.How can we educate children for a world different from ours?
2. How will we feed ourselves in the future?

These are important questions to ask no matter what your politics, religion or worldview. The only thing we know is inevitable, is change. Socieites and cultures are constantly changing, so why not spend some time considering how it might change.
 We look forward to your responses!