HOW I STARTED SHEEP FARMING. Vlog 346

i want to show you what we've been up to in this barn i hate talking years now because all of a sudden i'm aging myself oops do you guys want to know actually like all the bad stuff that happened because there's been a lot [Music] good afternoon i thought today i would do a little something a little different i have been i've been here on youtube with you guys for over three years now and i've done quite a few videos on sheep farming but this week's been a bit different i've had some interviews it's really forced me to kind of go back in time and realize how this all came to fruition how this all came to be kind of the journey on how i became a sheep farmer how i am still a sheep farmer kind of my roots where i came from how i was raised and just kind of kind of the story the struggles and the journey to where we are today which is doing exactly what i want to be doing and raising the animals that i so truly feel are my calling it hasn't been easy and it's been kind of i feel like i just got started i feel like i'm still learning so much every single day uh but i have been doing this for eight years now i think what i'll do is take you guys through the journey my journey into sheep farming the back story behind sheep farming and kind of what it all looks like now and maybe what i'm hoping for the future [Music] i think what we'll do is start across the road in my lamb barn which used to be my sheep barn and kind of give you the history on that and show you what we've been up to over there this week because it's kind of exciting so right away i want to show you what we've been up to in this barn so above my head is an air tube and what that is it's a fresh air tube ventilation system my vet designed so what it does is i have a hole on the end of the barn and uh there's a fan at the end of this tube it sucks in the fresh air from outside blows it through this tube and then there's holes [Applause] see the holes and those holes are positioned so it will hit the lambs at the right angle and they will actually get fresh air from outside that goes through these tubes we figured this fresh air system would work the best in here i talked to the suppliers the other day and they said the good thing about this thing is i believe we can shut off the intake from outside in the winter when it's so cold and you don't want the cold air blowing on the lambs and we can it's got another uh intake that will actually take air from the inside and just recirculate the air so i i don't know much about it yet i just still have to talk to my vet about the final details but it is up we just have to get the electrician in to wire it and uh and then i just have to get some instructions on how to run it i figured i'd get a nice seat because this might be a while i'm a little long-winded i have always been a farm kid a farm girl so there's there's me and my older sister and younger sister i am a middle child not a surprise to anyone that watches my channel we grew up on a dairy farm we were a product of the 80s which meant extremely high interest rates a lot of stress a lot of pressure on my family and on many people that we knew growing up in the 80s of course we didn't know any different because we were kids all we knew is that we had to do chores before doing anything else so if that was sports which i loved if that was joining students council if that was a 4-h meeting whatever it was chores needed to be done first and that has carried on in my life as you all see and witness every day so yes i did grow up uh many many years on a dairy farm till uh i hate talking years now because all of a sudden i'm aging myself i started university in and graduated with my degree in 1998 and in that time i met mark and went from being obsessed with the dairy industry and wanting to do something in agriculture in derry to loving field work loving agronomy loving the way plants grew and everything about plants uh probably because i had a little bit of a crush on the man i ended up marrying so uh it's funny how they always say oh wait till wait wait till you meet your partner before you make any life choices but uh that's probably bad and every woman watching this is probably cringing including me because i swore i would never be one of those however um the thing with mark is he shared my love for farming and it was not a hard thing to live with and want to be around all the time so fast forward we graduated i graduated 1998. we also got married in 1998 and i came to this farm where we are now then i was a chicken farmer so i went from milking cows to collecting eggs every day now these are not the eggs you eat these are actually broiler breeders so we had roosters and hens they ran around the barn free range there was no there's no cages no nothing it was just uh the only thing that resembled anything were nest boxes so the animals the hens could go into the nest boxes and lay eggs and we were hoping that those eggs would be fertile because they went to hatcheries and then the hatcheries would hatch out baby chicks the baby chicks would go to broiler farms and then for broilers they raised them for meat so that's what you would get at kentucky fried chicken mcdonald's for chalet so that was kind of my life for 13 years that is what i was doing when i had my kids trying to balance life i also helped mark in the fields not a whole lot to say about that whole time in my life except for the fact that work became an obsession because i somewhat lost my identity just as as a person because i don't know why i don't know if i was lost i don't know um if i was struggling mentally i wasn't sleeping well it led to uh somewhat of a mental breakdown i would say after years of not sleeping well and then started just really obsessing with with working and i wasn't managing well the animal part was fine but the people part i was really struggling with it was just layer after layer after layer and it just turned into one day um making a real hard choice to walk away we did and it was scary as probably the scariest moment of of my life so far in career-wise i didn't know any different i had worked really hard to understand the business that i was in so i was really resentful i felt like i was the one doing the sacrificing it took me took me a couple years to just come to terms with that and let it go and a lot of self-reflection and in that period of my life is when we started researching sheep and sheep was never on the radar in my entire life i knew nothing about them i'm still learning lots about them uh but yeah we we researched sheep mark saw that it was it had a lot of potential in the ontario market so i i went to my very first infrastructure course and i toured some very modern set up set up facilities for sheep and i fell in love they i fell in love with the systems i fell in love with the lambs i fell in love with the fact that they treated it like a business the the farms that i went to visit uh very intensive very uh driven and i just saw a lot of what i was leaving in in these farms that i visited there was really no looking back after those visits i uh i got home that night and i said to mark we're doing this and that's when we renovated that barn in there i've done tours of these barns before so i'll link those videos maybe below in the description if i remember and you can watch kind of how these all came to be but i really wanted to talk about the story and that i did not know growing up that i was going to be a sheep farmer not in a million years and that you may have ideas and and a plan and it's okay to walk away from those plans and sometimes sometimes you find a piece of yourself that may have been missing in the thing you thought you wanted this is the old barn so we started in here in 2012 after renovate i walked away from the chickens in 2011 we started shipper creek farms in 2012 and the first thing we did was get got that that old pig barn that we were just in we started with 50 u's and through throughout that year i gradually got up to about 150 100 to 150 just buying in stock from here and there and everywhere after a year kind of passed mark and i looked at each other and we started crunching numbers and we said this isn't going to work if we have to keep buying feed because we grow feed we need to utilize we need to utilize our land better if if we want to keep sheep here and he was also concerned about how much time it took me to do chores because we didn't have things in place to get feeding done in an efficient amount of time it's mark's usually my common sense driver here so yeah we looked at we looked at expanding the flock we talked to our banker and we decided to build that great big barn across the road and crazy as it was the one thing it did do because we invested it did force commitment and dedication and yes i know i'm lucky and blessed to be able to build on kind of on demand like that but it wasn't without sacrifice it was not without tears it was not without a constant burning in my stomach thinking that i wasn't going to be able to do it um it was three three three at least three probably truthfully closer to five years of really questioning what i'm doing but i never gave up and here we are now so i can't even believe it's the same barn actually looking back at old pictures we gutted it all myself and monty like right right to the steel outside we took off the ceiling took out the insulation it was a drop ceiling we took out all that blow in insulation was disgusting we left the steel on and then built we insulated on top of that and put another layer of steel on the very top on the roof so that's kind of how we did that and then we added the added the curtains and added the chimneys so for the most part and we re-uh we redid the floor [Music] so all this concrete floor with a raised feed alley and then the bunks are just wood wood uh wood manger fronts that i copied from another producer um yeah and then the only thing we've kind of invested in is again like i said those the new air tube and a couple years ago we put in the feed proportioner and that again if you can find little ways to be a little more efficient with feeding we like those quicker paybacks we kind of try to do some budget budgeting based on how quickly these things will pay back and if it's worth doing we've kept this barn pretty simple but we have definitely improved improved labor over here feeding before we were taking a feed cart and a pail and filling feeders and now we have these this cross auger system that that really really does help with increasing efficiency in time this is the barn that i started in and i still love it [Music] oops [Music] okay so that brings us to 2013 when we built this barn this bright span kind of fabric fabric roofed barn you you could say um i'm not gonna go into detail on the on the barn specs i've got a couple videos on all that and i will link them in the description below he's biting my bum stop biting my bum trying to concentrate trying to talk to the people stop okay i'm going to take it in this room because mark decided to pull the tractor up right beside the barn as i was trying to talk uh so 2013 we did purchase this barn we we built this barn it was to house 500 use what i found is less is more so i my happy spot seems to be around 400 years in here uh for 420 430. as soon as they start lambing all of a sudden the barn feels so full it is nice just to have a little more space in this barn and i also find it affects their health a lot stocking density is something we don't really talk a lot about but what i found in this barn is my use perform better they stay healthier i don't have the losses that i would have uh with more animals so so yes you can have more lambs uh throughout the year if i have more use my goal is to have the same amount of lambs coming out of less use because they're healthier and they're more productive so my goal is to not be a huge sheep producer i actually just want to do better with with less animals if that makes sense okay where do i begin in this barn uh we we bought a flock where a guy was dispersing so he was because of health problems he wanted out of sheep farming how i did it was fine but if i was to do it again i would have sourced all my sheep from from day one even from when i had the little barn across the road i would have sourced like a hundred u's from one place and one place that i know their their health status so they don't it's not that they have to be perfectly clean cheap but because i'm not sure if that even exists but the fact that they know what they're dealing with and they know how to either vaccinate for it or treat it or just basically give me give me a prescription map of what i'm dealing with so i know exactly what's coming in i know the enemy i think that's really important for any new sheep farmers to understand and realize is that yes clean sheep is like the north star it is the gold star but i'm wondering if that's just something that we're all striving to be but it is a really hard thing to actually be without totally closing up your flocks and doing ai and doing all these things so i would think it's more important as a new producer to try and buy from one source if you can have a relationship with the person if the person wants nothing to do with you after they sell you the sheep run away because it tells you that they're they don't stand behind their animal 2014 2015 is when i really revamped my flock by then i'd done some heavy heavy culling decisions i got i had between mortality and and culling decisions i i probably was down to half of the flock that i started with and from there i purchased all from one facility which were those steel composite you i call them steel composite that's not the word for them they don't really have a name of the breed so between 2014 2015 i brought those in they became my foundation genetics and every year since then i've kept some of their daughters so their daughters or some i have some purebred rito so i kept some of the puberto daughters and i'm just trying to build build my own replacements from that foundation genetics so let's talk about the boys shall we i love my boys see the boys i have what do i have now do i have four different breeds and i think i have four now i have ilda france suffolk rito and i have these steel composite rams that i bought last december the suffolk and the eel de france i kind of have just for my market side so my ram lambs and any you lamps that that i don't really the use that i want to breed but i really don't want to keep their daughters for whatever reason i will try to breed those to the suffolk or the ill de france the ritos i have to put on those steel composite used to make a nice steel rito cross ulam i also have the steel rams that i brought in so i can actually put them with the steel composite foundation flock and then i have my own purebred steel animals if that makes sense i do have to take a few seconds and talk about feed health reproduction really everything in livestock comes down to feed so that's our crops how the quality of our hay outside the quality of our corn or corn silage that we're trying to get get ready to go here everything boils down to a really good feeding program and that might be out on pasture if you have a pasture program but for for producers like me that rely on um stored feed quality is huge moisture is huge and amounts and how that always changes depending on your your feed testing is so so so important so i right away got with a feed company uh jamie has been my feed guy probably since 2014 i'm gonna say so we have developed we have a a love hate relationship a lot uh because he will tell me what i'm doing wrong and i hate being told what i'm doing wrong but i also rely on him when things go sideways he is my first call the other person i have on top all the time is my vet and that could be just texting it could be a phone call so knowing what you're feeding is truly truly part of the magic sauce as to how to keep these animals held in good good health and condition and not get overweight that's what i'm struggling with now they're almost there they're fat so i do have to i do have to worry about that going forward but yeah feed and vet is truly a game changer in this business if you want to treat it as a business and do this as a career do you guys want to know actually like all the bad stuff that happened because there's been a lot do i want to tell you all the bad stuff that do i remember or do i block it out i can tell you a few bad things that have happened let's kind of talk about a little bit when we got into this business we got into this business in 2012 prices were high everything looked good everything on paper worked 2013 the market crashed nothing worked not only that my results were so so bad my first lambing group across the road my first 13 aborted so they did not go all the way to they almost went to term and the ones that did go full term the lambs came out really weak and they died about five minutes later i had no idea what was going on i sent some to a lab and it ended up being like a little bit of chlamydia which i fight to this day so again know your enemy before uh stuff goes sideways which it did immediately with me unfortunately with sheep we learn a lot through the failures it sucks but it's kind of it's kind of what happens it showed me right away i needed a vet it showed me right away that i need to get on a good feed system and a good vaccination program so vaccinations to me are so so so key and i've been doing it ever since that very first flock that came in that first 50 years i came in i have been on a vaccination program ever since in 2014 um i broke my leg i broke my leg doing chores and it was the winter and mark was really busy so for all those that complain that mark is never in the barn mark has probably got a little bit of ptsd that's my stress from the year i broke my leg because he was juggling sitting on a commodity board like executive like a pretty busy position he was trying to run our grain farm and he also had to be a sheep farmer for six weeks full time lambing out 300 u's so he has put in his time he knew from that time that he was not going to be a sheep farmer he bought me this because he knew the day that i i was given the green light to work again i would not be able to get into a skid steer so this is why we purchased the used bobcat is that is the history behind it um but it did go to show us that in a pinch we all have to know how to do each other's job i knew he would do that right when i want to talk to you guys sorry you guys had to come back in here i hope you can't hear that but he's cleaning out his prayer some other little things that have happened along the way some of them have been documented because i have been youtubing for three years so if you go way back to the beginning you will see that i used to lamb a lot in the winter in the dead cold of winter and this barn just isn't equipped for a january and february lambing not not for me not for one person and what was happening is i just couldn't keep up because the cold weather brings on so many different issues frozen water frozen pails lamps lambs freezing before you can get colostrum to them just lambs getting laid on because they're snuggling up to mom and mom doesn't see them so just just winter in this barn as much as if there's lambs already here so december works well for me now because because the cold weather when there are lambs when they're older lambs they actually do really well because they don't pick up the bugs so that works really really well but when they're brand new in that freezing cold uh it just it really does add to your workload march is starting to get a bit better march and december seem to be those months that are although they're cold it's not that wind chill of like minus 30 so uh 30 celsius i seem to be able to get around it a little better i have a little more time to keep lambs alive and thriving um that and i've just learned a lot over over the last few years so that's the one thing i have given up because i failed at it kudos for everyone that winter lambs because it is it is hard with a really cold barn most people if they land in the winter they've they're prepared for it they've got better facilities they're a little bit warmer even around zero is good because your your water is not going to freeze and and the animals will stay will stay good at zero it's um it's when you get under that it becomes a little bit of a problem some other things that have happened through the years that you guys have been with me along the way is you know a big storm hit last year took off half my roof they had the roof up in less than a week again and and that finally got completed this spring just uh finally that final stretch and the cut but all the side things that happened because of that the rain that comes in the flooding the just just things that just kept going sideways because one thing isn't right and i find with farming that can be what happened when all systems are a go everything works really good but when one thing is out sometimes it just is a ripple effect if you are just new to sheep farming or you're looking at sheep farming i'm sure you're watching this for some advice or for some tips i'll probably give you my top five and the first one is uh try to buy your stock from one from one place i mean that might be different the use might come from one place the rams might come from a different place because your breeds might be a bit different and that's cool but just always be aware every time you bring in animals from different sources you have the potential of bringing in new bugs it's no different than kindergarten when we send all our kids to kindergarten and they haven't had any exposure to any other kids and then they come home they're sick till christmas we just we just know this now this year's completely i probably don't have to explain viruses to you health issues can can kind of rear their ugly head when you least expect it or when you least want it number two uh really really figure out how you're going to manage your feed and what that looks like are you are they going to be outside are they going to be inside you know are you buying feed are you growing feed feed can be the thing that keeps you in business or pushes you out because it affects everything it affects reproduction it affects the health it affects your bottom line just in the cost of feeding in and feed out even the size of your animal depicts how much feed you're going to use in a year so so even though some breeds look really really nice if if you can't get production out of them and you have to feed a really big animal you have to be just really really aware of what that looks like economically health is so so so critical so work with a vet if you can even if that just just establish a relationship that you know you can just text whenever and and get some and get advice or you can show a picture of something gone wrong and they can if they can't be here at least they can walk you through stuff so i would say um health will be one of those things you're always learning it's there's new things all the time especially during lambing you think you've seen it all and i guarantee you haven't seen everything number four figure out your efficiencies at the end of the day sheep farming it doesn't have to be a business that's not what you're in it for for me i'm in this um to be economical to be a business to be able to stand on my own we do some enterprise accounting so we do have a lot of stuff broken down but at the end of the day there's so many things that we share i do rely on the grain side for good feed know your efficiencies like what do you have available for you is it a barn is a pasture and and learn that management system learn how you're going to be the most economical and efficient doing it um if it's going to take you all day to feed 50 sheep then you need to look at figuring out a way to do that in a half an hour um so just things like that that i've learned along the way is to to know your system know what will know your system and know the economics behind it and i would say the fifth thing is know you know you know your management style know what you like if lambing is something you want to do once a year develop a system that you that's an annual lambing system and maybe you can lay them outside if you have a pasture-based system if you like lambing all the time that's your favorite thing to do and you want to go go go go and you want to have cash flow all year long uh then the unaccelerated system like mine and mine isn't even an intensive one there there's some that are a lot uh shorter time between groups then look at that so figure out you and how you manage your animals and go with a system that will work and that you won't burn yourself out i was lambing every six weeks i am now lambing every 12 weeks and that has made a huge difference to the feeling of burnout anyway that's kind of how i have gotten here i didn't even talk about my youtube journey i've talked about that in other videos but i did start youtube in 2017. it has been a long road it has been probably i thought sheep farming was hard and really hard on my ego youtube has has um been as hard i've gotten to the point now where i just i love the community that's here i feel comfortable talking about my journey to you guys and i just feel like there's been enough new people that have joined the channel that they really don't know who i am and where i came from just know that you are coming in into my life after eight years of struggling really struggling you know even personally i've had a lot of things that have happened i had a bit of a breakdown and i lost um for the first time in my life i lost i lost a dear friend death no matter who or who it is is challenging but when it's a when it's a close friend it stays with you and it pops up when you're like most vulnerable yeah there's there's been a lot of things you've been along for which is amazing um but please know that i'm not here to ever uh gloat or show you how good life is because everyone has a side you don't see i try to show you everything i try to show you the bad as as well as the good i do believe that most of my audience wants me to succeed so i do try to show the successes but humbly enough that you don't think i'm here bragging or gloating because i have so so far to go i am not that i'm i don't even consider myself a a good sheep farmer i consider myself a a student and i'm still learning and and the reason i have the channel is to bring you guys along with me and and along this journey this has been really long-winded my throat hurts it's not covered don't worry it's just me talking too much i will cut out probably three quarters of this thank you for being here thank you for being a part of this journey if i've missed anything or you want me to talk about an area that i missed please let me know in the comments below and again if you have been with me from the very start in 2017 and you hit that subscribe button i love you so much and thank you if you hit that subscribe button today or yesterday or a second ago i love you just as much thank you for being here thank you for believing in me thank you for celebrating the successes with me and thank you for crying when i'm crying here's to showing up for you guys showing up for my animals and um and just constantly trying to improve and be better and to be a better person i love you guys we will see you soon the lambies are coming

Channel: Sandi Brock

Views: 159,030

Rating: 4.9685831 out of 5

Keywords: How I got started in sheep farming, starting a sheep farm from scratch, tips when starting your first sheep farm, how to run a sheep farm, how to feed sheep, what things do I need to know before getting into sheep, things that can go wrong when starting a sheep farm, what style of barn is needed for a sheep barn, indoor sheep farm, how to manage a sheep flock, how to manage a sheep farm

Id: lzR4Ifh53Y0

Length: 32min 41sec (1961 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 12 2020