Will You Be The First Sheep?

posted on

January 9, 2021

Have you ever been so excited about something that you could just take off and run?

Aimlessly and without direction. Running just for the fun and sheer enjoyment of running. Running to the point that maybe you forgot why you were running or what you were so excited about to begin with?

Haha well likely you are wondering when my update from the frontlines of regenerative agriculture and family farming turned into a gym pitch and let me assure you that that is not the case. 

But I could think of no better description for the behavior that I witnessed my entire flock of sheep and goats exhibit when I moved them last week to a new section of winter stockpiled forage. 

Sheep in particular are just funny creatures. They get excited easily (in a good super enthusiastic way) and they will often just jump and spin in the air. Just randomly or when walking through a gate. I will try to take a video of that sometime. Its hard to catch but hysterical to watch. 

Anyway, last week after being released on a new section of winter stockpiled forage (grass set aside for later) the sheep and goats became so excited that they just ran and ran and ran. 

You have to watch this

Sometimes its the simple things on the farm that can bring the most joy. 

Honestly though the sheep reminded me of a good lesson: Be Thankful

And when you experience something good (even things that happen almost every day) celebrate, be joyful, have a little fun. Don't be afraid to show that you are thankful.

After all, as you just saw, such joy filled behavior is contagious. If the first sheep had never started running and jumping just because it wanted to, the others almost certainly would not have either and they all would have missed out. 

Can you be the first sheep to run this week?

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Our New Lake

On the farm, we plan out our regenerative grazing well ahead of time to ensure that the soil, plants, and livestock all benefit from the sybiotic relationships that exist from temporary peridic grazing between all three.Sometimes though the weather has other plans and we have to adapt. Haha case in point about two weeks ago we got just under 9 inches of rain in 36 hours. Now on our farm a majority of the rain still just soaked into the ground through healthy root channels and pore spaces from years of planned regenerative grazing. For farms for miles around us though most of that water quickly ran off and into creeks and rivers. This caused a creek on the back of our farm to flood well outside of its banks. When I went down that morning to check on the sheep I was quite surprised to see that we had a new lake on the farm!You see we have a 60 acre area of bottom ground (low elevation ground with deep soil near to a creek or river). When I got there about 25 acres was underwater!!! This was just part of it but you wan see the sheep's watering trough is underwater - haha they certainly weren't thirsty!Thankfully as the water rose the sheep just slowly meandered to the north to higher ground.  They do not like water at all and will not willingly ford even a shallow stream so I was quite glad they had not gotten cut off on one of the now islands of land that had just the day before been the higher areas of the low bottom fields!Later that afternoon, Judah and Ephraim went to look at our new lake and reported that they could not see the watering tank. I thought that was kind of strange but figured they just missed seeing it as it hadn't rained at all that day. As I pondered it for a few more hours though I got to thinking that they are actually very reliable little scouts and they know what it looks like. On a hunch I went back down there only to discover that upriver flooding had continued to pour more water into our bottom and we now had a 55 acre lake!!!!Everything in that video and pictures  that had been still land was now underwater and the sheep were at the very top of the field. A gate was promptly opened and they were let out of the low bottom fields completely onto the much drier upland fields. Thankfully everything was fine and stunningly the next day all the water had receded and our lake was gone. A new layer of top soil had been deposited on our thickly vegetated bottom fields as well which will be nice for long term fertility but in the short term made the forage quite muddy so even though we had originally planned for the sheep to graze those bottom fields for about two weeks (split into several 3-4 day subdivisions) they in fact only spent two days there. Well on the farm sometimes you just have to adapt and that's just what we did. We made a new grazing plan, skipped the rest of the bottoms for a few weeks until some rain could wash the dirt off of the grass and things could dry up a bit. Haha basically adapt and improvise. Thankfully the bottom does not flood very often (this is the first time in about 8 years) but when it does we can get a very large lake overnight + ducks :)I hope things aren't too wet your way.