Managing the sheep & cows in the summer | Our small family farm

[Music] there's a lot of beauty to be had on the farm but not all of it looks the same way down at the house there's blooming foxglove and little baby chickens and peach trees and all kinds of really obviously beautiful kinds of things but up here at the barn there's a different kind of beauty there's the grittier dirtier maybe a little bit messier type of farming but this is a big part of what we do here on our homestead and this week we have a lot that we need to take care of with our sheep and our dairy cow so i want you to come along and i want to show you what this looks like in the summer before we head out today to do all the farm work that needs to be done i'd like to thank babel for sponsoring today's video so hang with me for just 60 seconds and i'm gonna tell you why babel is the number one language learning app in the entire world they have over 10 million subscribers why because they use real people language experts native speakers with relevant dialogue we're using real life language to teach those of us who want to learn how to speak a new language in a format that we can actually learn with words and phrases that we'll actually need to speak this language with native speakers babel even offers live classes and podcasts that you can listen to right on the app which means that you get real-time language experience and you can get six months for free so right now go click that link pick out one of the languages that you would like to learn and invest just 10 to 15 minutes a day exploring a new language connecting with a new culture and traveling the world if only in your mind there's an old saying that the only thing horse people have in common is horses which basically is saying there's a million different ways to do what i'm about to show you and a million different opinions about how we do things here on our farm but this is the way that we have found with our sheep and our cow that work well for us first things first you'll realize throughout this video that farming is really a lot about community we couldn't do anything that we do here on our farm without our local community and we're going to be relying a lot on them as we go about our tasks for this summer the first thing that we need to do is go and borrow a livestock trailer unless there's some kind of vet emergency which we really haven't had here on the farm we don't really have use for a livestock trailer except for twice a year and that's when we're taking animals to either be bred or taking them to pasture and then when we're picking them up again but other than that the animals stay right here on our two and a half acres luckily we have a friend from church who allows us to borrow his livestock trailer whenever we need to move our livestock the funny part about this is he lives way on the other side of the valley and the sheep are only going to be moving about a mile this way so it's kind of a roundabout way to get the job done but we're really grateful that he's willing to share this with us so we might as well get a coffee make a little morning of it and go get the trailer [Music] while the animals are gone we have a lot to do we have our own fence to fix here so that this pasture is ready for when cece comes back we had a calf go through it last year and just break the metal apart it was amazing so we have some fence patching to do we have a lot of watering to do because all these pastures have to get be kept alive and we use a gigantic sprinkler that we have to move daily we also want to extend this animal pen that you see behind me these are the animals winter quarters and we would like for it to come all the way out here so that they have way more room to spread out and of course just the general cleanup that constantly goes along with animals this means organizing grain organizing hay getting our next hay delivery so that we can stop start stocking up hay for winter which is a big project and it also means we have to clean out our hay barn that we have filled with all manner of things while we haven't been feeding hay so our homestead is only on two and a half acres and we get asked a lot how do you graze that many animals on two and a half acres the answer is we don't but we do have neighbors with a plot of land that they need grazed and we need a spot to put our sheep for the summer and so every year we load the sheep up in the trailer and we take them on over to the neighbors which is just a little ways down the road but before we can do that we have to go and do a little bit of fence repair because inevitably fences take wear and tear you don't hear a lot about fence building when it comes to home setting but this is a really big part of it especially if you have livestock you constantly have to be walking the fence line so once we get the fence taken care of then we can load up the sheep in the trailer which is always easier said than done and inevitably we just end up sort of grabbing them and wrestling them onto the trailer but we got there in the end and they will happily graze at this place until probably september or early october when the grass stops growing so what this means for us it's not all hands off from this point on we have to make sure that they have water and this includes making sure that the water filter is clean we also have to make sure that the fence stays secure so that predators can't get in and the sheep can't get out and then of course they need a shelter from the sun particularly here and from storms so this shelter that you see in the video is one that we just got last year but it took a complete thrashing and a windstorm that we had but you have to kind of make do when you homestead you can't just be going out and buying new stuff all the time so it's twine and it's maybe broken pieces of fence paneling and it's maybe bent up frames of shelters but we're going to make it work because this is what we have you have to be resourceful so this pasture that the sheep are in right now there's a lot of different types of grass in there and alfalfa but there's also a lot of weeds sheep are actually really good for weeds they eat this down every year and every year there's less weeds so when we can see that they're really getting particular and feeling like they're not quite getting enough we'll just take out some of this alfalfa hay throw that out there as well so that they can graze and live their best life in an open green field but also make sure that they're getting all the nutrition that they need to get nice and fat so we keep one ram and three breeding use year round the rest are lambs that are born every spring so now that the sheep are taken care of and they are a little ways away for the rest of the summer we needed to turn our attention to cecilia who is our dairy cow cece is the queen of our farm and she has worked so hard for us she's given us four calves in a row back to back year to year and this is a lot of milking for us so we decided to give her body a break this year and to take a break from milking so she's currently dry which means she's not producing any milk cows have a nine month gestation just like a human and so we want to calf next spring which means that we need to breed her now now this is much easier considering she's dry and we don't need to have her at home to milk her every day the reason this is such a bonus is because there's really two ways to breed a cow the first is what's called live cover meaning a bowl live cover is the cow and the second is artificial insemination we have no ai techs here and i took a class on it in college but i don't remember enough to do it successfully it's really difficult to get a vet out here to do it which means that live cover is really our best option again we're relying on our community here so i have an old orcharding friend up the road that runs a herd of longhorn bulls in a beautiful piece of property that he has up in the mountains cece has been with this herd before she knows them she was covered by this bull last year and so we're going to take her back up to the mountains and she'll spend the next six weeks frolicking around in these beautiful hills with that herd so if she hangs with the herd for six weeks that means she has two cycles or two opportunities to be bred luckily cece is young and she's in good health so she usually takes on that first cycle but think of the second cycle as kind of like a clean sweep just to make sure [Music] even though it's a ton of work if you don't have animals on your homestead yet i would encourage you to get some they'll keep you humble they'll keep you busy keep you very happy [Music] you

Channel: The Elliott Homestead

Views: 30,077

Rating: 4.9424758 out of 5

Keywords: The Elliott Homestead, The Elliot Homestead, Shaye Elliott, Shaye Elliot, Homesteading family, Homestead, Small farm, Family cow, Sheep, Raising animals

Id: 76cX63ox3d4

Length: 9min 36sec (576 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 06 2021