Farming in the shade

I think last week we achieved a new level of working smarter, not harder. A couple of times each summer we sort the lambs from their mothers and check all the sheep for parasites. We run them up the chute into the shearing area, which helps us handle them quickly and easily. This is a positive thing for them--who wants to stand in line for hours? They want to get back out to pasture as soon as they can. Anyway, the chute and shearing area have always been a part of our sorting and handling. But this time The Farmer and his assistants set up a chute system to help sort the Suffolk sheep from the Polypay sheep after they've been checked for worms. You see, it's almost time for breeding, and so we sorted the dark faced sheep from the white faced sheep. The Suffolks (dark-faced) are bred earlier, so that their lambs can be ready for kids to show in the July fairs. So the Suffolks went left, through the long barn and out to a back pasture. And the Polypays, due to be bred later, we...

Thursday mid-morning we had a visitation... We were honored to be one of the farms featured on the Entrepreneurial Farm Tour (have you ever tried to spell that word?) hosted by Michigan State University Extension. The participants had about an hour or so at our farm. Here Dr. Adam is giving an introduction. The Farmer is showing off some corn from one of our fields. Weeds and all... The participants of the tour got to see our composting operation , as well as the sheep and our rotational grazing program. We ended up in our little workshop , where we showed a few things we've been able to do with the wool from our farm. Then everyone hopped back on the shiny bus and off they went to the next farm. Wonder what the neighbors thought...

Calves are born without any antibodies and must receive them from their mother's first milk, called colostrum. One cowhide can produce enough leather to make 20 footballs or 18 soccer balls or 18 volleyballs or 12 basketballs. Mature cattle have 32 teeth: 8 incisors on the bottom front, a tough pad of skin instead of teeth on the top front, and 6 molars on the top and bottom of each side.

This week I'm planning/scheduling school for the year. Every summer my parents (bless their hearts) go camping for a week with our kids. The kids get away from the farm, build memories with their grandparents, and have fun. I get solitude. Solitude doesn't automatically equal peace. I've got a bushel of pears on the basement floor, ripening faster than I'd like. The knowledge that I should be canning them robs me of some of my peace. The Farmer wants me to accompany him on a day trip for his work, but I need to make the most of my time scheduling and planning now, while the house is quiet. A project at my job continues to take up some valuable real estate in my brain, always making little bumping noises in a far corner of my mind, even when I'm not working on it or consciously thinking about it. Summer is almost over, and some shoulda-coulda-wouldas nag me a bit. And there is the fire monitor that continues to intrude. The Farmer is a part-time firefighter and medi...

From another farm blog: I hear many city people complaining that farming has gotten too big, that mega farms abound and we have no small farms left. In some ways that is true. In the 1930s, about 25% of the country’s population resided on the nation’s 6,000,000 farms. By 1997, 157,000 farms accounted for 72% of farm sales, with only 2% of the U.S. population residing on farms. Yet when you dig into the facts, the average farm in the U.S. is still under 500 acres, a size that is not mega. Finish reading the article here .