Colonel’s Blog, Earthdate 24 July 2023…
Hey Y’all!
Good evening and happy Monday from Air2Ground Farms! It was a warm humid day today. The animals are doing very well! The cow and her new calf that were separated from the herd decided to rejoin the herd today. We tried the other day, unsuccessfully, to get them back together with the herd. The cow just wasn’t interested. Today, she moved herself to the pasture right next to the herd and waited for us to open the gate. As soon as we opened it, she and her calf moved right through. The herd rushed over to see who was joining and it was as if they forgot who she was. There was a lot of pushing and shoving, sniffing, and mooing. They should be settled down in an hour or so. We worked in the garden and “yard” for the majority of the day. We picked veggies and pulled weeds. We mowed, weeded, and moved the bottle lambs. I included a couple of pics of the lambs. They are really growing, except for the one that refused and still refuses to drink milk. She is spunky and healthy, just not very big. This evening, we looked up and saw Tozer carrying a duck in his mouth. After lots of arm flailing, screaming, and running we determined that he was carrying the duck very very carefully back to its yard. He was being so gentle that the duck didn’t even have slobbers on it. He set it down by the fence and the duck tried its hardest to get back in but we had to give it a hand over the fence. We made some yogurt today as the milk fridge has fully recovered from the power outage and is now full again.
The ewes are struggling to maintain their body condition as the lambs are getting bigger but still nursing. It is difficult on the quality of grass that we currently have for them to get enough nutrients to both nurse and maintain their condition. We are probably going to wean the lambs early in order to allow the ewes to recover before the weather starts getting cold. They lose condition fast but it takes a long time for them to regain it. With that in mind, we are going to start grazing them towards the pens yet again so we can get the lambs separated. When we do that, we will combine the bottle lambs and the other lambs and everyone will wean together. Thankfully, we were able to clear the lane yesterday which allowed the cow and calf to go through and will allow us to get the sheep to the pens. We plan to separate the ewes and lambs about as far apart as they can get on this farm. There will be a couple of days of bellowing from both groups but after that, they will be just fine.
Local Farm Report for 24 July 2023:
Harvest:
27 Chicken eggs
13 Duck eggs
7 Gallons of milk
Cheers!
Psycho & Shelley
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