The Hopeful Homesteader

Tag: sheep

  • And then there were sheep…

    I am not entirely sure where the idea of needing sheep for the farm really started, all I know is that once I had that idea, I was dead set on it. So much so that I used Penny’s cuteness to my advantage to persuade Brent that we absolutely needed to have them. I didn’t even really care what kind of sheep we got and did very little research into which ones would be ideal for our climate and farm size, I just knew I wanted some. I liked the idea of seeing little lambs running around, even though I am not a big fan of eating lamb and generally only buy it once a year when I am making my annual batch of tourtière meat. Whatever the motivation, I was dead set on getting some sheep and we lucked out that our neighbour down the road happened to be selling some lambs which we put a deposit down at the beginning of April, and we got to pick them up last week. Finally, we had my sheep, although technically they are the girls’ sheep as they were part of their Easter presents. So now, we have Snowy and Fluffy.

    The process of picking them up seemed much simpler than when Brent picked up our calf Buttercup which was about an hour and a half away, all on the highway. This was just going to be a 30 second drive down our dirt road, much simpler. This time around, all four of us came to pick up the new additions. The girls were excited to be getting their sheep but also excited to be going back to our neighbour’s farm. They had been once before to visit the sheep and thought that it was the coolest place. They have donkeys, pigs, sheep, several cows, dogs, cats, chickens, ducks and turkeys. When we went to visit the sheep the first time, they had just gotten their chicks in and had piglets as well and the girls were so excited. This time, Penny was initially disappointed that the chicks were no longer small and, in the barn, until she saw that there were 3 calves all under a week old in there instead. Suddenly, she didn’t miss the chicks anymore. We finally tore the girls away from all the other animals and went to get the lambs. I will say that I felt a little sad taking the two lambs away from their moms, especially when I heard the ewes baaing, but as soon as they were given some food they stopped, and I felt less guilty. Brent felt pretty confident about getting the lambs into the trailer as they were only about 25-30lbs, and he had gotten Buttercup in when she was about 85lbs. However, Buttercup was much more docile. When he put the trailer gate down and popped Fluffy in there, she immediately ran out. This led to the funny sight of Brent trying to catch this little ball of fluff. It became apparent that we would need to have the trailer gate closed and pass the lambs to Brent. This also meant that I would have to hold the lamb and pass it to him, something I never thought I would be doing. When I held Fluffy, I just couldn’t get over how soft and fluffy her wool really was! Definitely one of the cooler things I have done since starting the hobby farm.

    Once we got home, it was time to unload the lambs. The problem was, they were still very wary of us. They knew we had just taken them from their usual surroundings, and they were not going to come easily. This of course provided me with another fun visual of Brent crouched down under the tarp of the trailer trying to grab these little lambs. He passed me the lambs one at a time and I brought them gently into the barn. We had locked Buttercup in her outdoor grazing area as I feared she might think the lambs were playmates and she would squish them seeing as she already tries to mount our two golden retrievers. Once they got settled in, we started figuring out what we would do for sleeping arrangements in the barn. When we first got Buttercup, Brent had made a little sleeping stall out of old pallets, and we were still putting her there at night for bed. We concluded that the sheep would now have that area as Buttercup is getting considerably bigger, and she would sleep in the open area of the barn. The additional upside to this is that I no longer had to try and herd her into her little sleeping stall at night which often was a challenge. After sorting that out, Brent got to building the sheep an outdoor area of their own. This was slightly more challenging than when he built Buttercup’s outdoor area because a) there was no door on the side of the barn that their stall was on and b) the pasture on the back side of the barn had a lot more stuff on it from Brent’s jobs and the previous owner of the house. I was pretty amazed at how quickly Brent moved the old lumber and random items that had accumulated over the past couple years and then marvelled at him once again building an outdoor pen using stuff he already had around the yard. This is yet again another advantage of having a carpenter husband, he always has extra materials. I had been complaining for two years about the piles of chain link fence he was saving as I was convinced it was trash because we were never going to put chain link in our yard…It is a good thing he didn’t listen to my nagging because now we have an outside pen for the sheep and for Buttercup, and it didn’t cost us a thing. The only issue with the design is that Brent had to use of the many doors he has stored up from renovation houses and had to cut it down to size. This means there is no easily accessible handle to close it, so when I was trying to close the door quickly last night before the lambs ran out again, I accidentally slammed the door on my pinky finger which meant I spent last night with an ice pack and ibuprofen hoping that the swelling would go down.

    The thing the girls were unprepared for, was the fact that the sheep would be scared of them. When we bought Buttercup, she immediately let the girls hug her and pet her. The lambs, however, were not so accommodating. As soon as the girls would get close, the lambs would run in the other direction. All they wanted was to be able to cuddle their fluffy lambs and the lambs were terrified of them. Cece has more patience and has been getting closer and closer to them by being very still and slowly moving their grain tray closer to her so they can get used to her. Penny’s approach is to run at them and tell them it is fine, and she loves them. I felt pride that tonight I was able to pet Fluffy which is our brown one, for a couple seconds while she ate, before Snowy, the white one, got freaked out which then freaked out Fluffy. This brief interaction though made me confident that by the end of the month we should be able to pet them easily without them running away.

    It has only been a week with these little lambs, but I am so happy we have them. Brent might say too happy, as I am already talking about wanting to grow our little flock and was asking our neighbour how easy would it be to find a babydoll ram to breed with our lambs. She informed me that we would need to wait until the sheep are two years old before they can be bred. When the time comes, I do think I want to breed them with a babydoll ram to maintain that breed as much as possible because they have such nice wool and just the cutest little faces that always look like they are smiling. A little research into the breed taught me that they are generally pretty docile sheep, usually very friendly and up for being pet (fingers crossed) and that their wool is very soft and almost like cashmere. The articles I read said they were ideal as hair and meat sheep and best for small farms, cottages and petting zoos, so basically perfect for our little homestead. I would love to say that all those reasons factored into me buying these particular lambs, but it was just sheer luck as I didn’t even think to ask what breed they were until we had already purchased them. Having only had the sheep for a week, I can say with complete naïve confidence, that these are great animals to have around and I simply can’t wait to have more of them!

  • The things you learn when trying to add livestock to your homestead…

    Because we live in Manitoba, spring takes a while to reach us. During the cold winter months, we turned our attention to acquiring animals for the spring. There are certain things I expected to learn when we started the endeavour into homesteading/hobby farming. For instance, I assumed I would learn a lot about the importance of proper fencing with animals, how to properly care for various farm animals, how to slaughter those animals humanely and where to go to process the meat. However, there were certain things that I did not expect to learn during this process, some which made me laugh and others that simply frustrated me to no end. Full disclosure, some of these discoveries will come as no surprise to anyone who has experience in hobby farming, but as a first-time homesteader, I was naively unaware about pretty much everything involved in the process.

    To start, I had the very foolish idea that it would be easy to find animals to add to our farm. I honestly assumed that I would simply type into Google “calf for sale near me” and that I would be able to find one relatively quickly for a reasonable price. Part of the reason I believed this was because last year when we were just starting to talk about getting animals in the near future, we had asked Brent’s cousin who has cattle, and he had told us that we should be able to find a calf pretty easily and that we shouldn’t pay more than $500 per calf. This seemed like a pretty decent deal for the amount of meat we would be able to get once it was fully grown. Unfortunately for us, we could not have predicted that cattle prices would skyrocket by the next year when we started looking for ours. When we started looking, we noticed that people now are asking $1000-$1500 per calf! Not only that, but there are way fewer people offering up bottle calves and people are clearly jumping at the chance to get them, thus justifying the price. As we continue looking, we are faced with the not so fun prospect of having to spend double what we had intended and then add on the fact that some of these cows are 2.5-3 hrs away from us. Brent remains confident he can find a cow for cheaper, despite the fact that when he posted an add on one of the cattle selling pages saying “$500 cash for a calf, will pick up today” most of the responses included people telling him he was dreaming or that he needed a time machine.

    Despite Brent’s confidence to be able to find a calf for a good price, we started discussing the idea of getting a yearling. For those unfamiliar with cow terminology a yearling is a cow between one and two years old that hasn’t had her first calf. This was disappointing to me because I had hoped to have the experience of a cute little cow that the girls and I would be able to feed with a bottle and bond with before the inevitable slaughtering time. Now, my mother questioned whether that would perhaps make it harder to kill and eat and that the girls might not be happy when their cow was gone. I would like to be clear that we have had full discussions with Cece about the process and explained that we want to make sure that the meat we are eating was treated well before it was killed and didn’t come from a feedlot. Penny is still too young to really understand so I am sure we will have some tears there for sure. This led to some new discoveries when we were looking at older cows, either male or female because at this point, we aren’t as picky. The funniest discovery I made was how the male cows that were up for auction were detailed in their write up. They always mention the birth weight, what breeds their parents were and then, if they are being sold as potential breeders, they list their scrotal circumference…The first time I saw this I couldn’t help but laugh. I was just not at all prepared for the idea that it would be something to even consider. This also led me to questioning who has the unfortunate job of having to measure something like that? Also are buyers actually going to get out a measuring tape to confirm that it is accurate? I am assuming that seeing as it is listed on many of the breeder bull write ups that it is something that is often considered when purchasing a bull, but I think I can confidently say that it will never be on our checklist when purchasing any future cattle.

    With cattle seeming more and more expensive and in short supply, I decided to turn my attention to my animal of choice, as well as Penny’s, sheep. In my mind, they are so cute and fluffy. I have seen several Instagram reels about curious and rambunctious sheep, most notably the little black-face sheep. Obviously, I was curious about whether or not we could get some black face sheep and quickly discovered that they were called Valais Blacknose sheep. In my mind, this name is deceiving because it isn’t just their noses that are black, but alas, that is their name. I had seen some ads for other breeds of sheep, and they all seemed to be asking between $80-$150 per lamb. This seemed extremely reasonable, especially after seeing the prices for cows. I figured, if regular sheep were $150, then a special cute breed like the Valais, would probably be maybe $300. Oh man was I wrong! On the Valais Blacknose site that sells out of Manitoba, they were asking $35,000 for one of their rams! And yes, I checked the numbers several times to make sure I read it right, and no I did not mess up on my decimal point typing this out. I could not wrap my head around how someone, would willingly pay that much money for a sheep. Now I am sure, if I looked around and did more searching, I could find some for slightly less, but still the idea of spending tens of thousands of dollars on a sheep just blew my mind. Thankfully, one of our neighbours down the road has some pregnant ewes and we are on standby for some lambs.

    Finally, I discovered that there is a wide range of animals that fall under the “livestock Manitoba” search on Kijiji. I found many people selling rabbits, which I know the girls would love to have, but Brent and I have agreed it will never happen. We told the girls that they technically have a pet bunny that we see in our front yard all the time. To make it feel more like their own pet, we told them to name the bunny, so we now say hi to Dandelion most mornings as she or he, really who knows, eats their breakfast in the morning. I made the mistake of letting the girls look with me through the ads once and they saw that someone was selling ostrich eggs for hatching and included pictures of the fully grown ostriches. This created terror in Cece and Penny got upset when I said we absolutely could not buy an ostrich. The variety of birds available is astonishing, and also unsettling for me as someone who really dislikes birds. The girls wanted all of them. That was until they saw the goats, dwarf goats, mini horses, mini donkeys and at one point a mini highland cow. That last one was the hardest for me to say no to, because I would love to have a highland cow, mini or full-sized. We even looked up some mini highlands at one point, and they were hardly better than the Valais sheep. They wanted $25,000 for one mini cow…I did eventually find a more reasonably priced site that was asking only $3500 per calf, but still a lot to pay for a pet.

    Despite all these high-priced animals and scarcity of calves, this has not deterred us one bit from wanting to start our farm. Brent has purchased the fencing; we’ve been mapping out our acreage and I have spent many nights reading about what is required to raise bottle-fed lambs. I am still excited to get to raise some animals and get to teach my girls how to take care of them as well. I am confident that at some point in the future, when I am much more knowledgeable about farming, I will look back at these days when I was naïve and laugh about my shock and surprise with the details of purchasing animals. But for now, I will always laugh at the idea of some poor worker whose job it is to measure the scrotal circumference of the bulls going up for auction.