Brrrrr!

We have been on a Blog break for a while. Time to come back.

SO SO SO much has happened!

The main change - the most visible one - is that all our animals are in the barn (I should say barns). We were going to keep the sheep out in the pasture, and they would have been very happy out there, but the truth is that our pasture did not have enough grass for them this year. Next year we will have time to seed it and organize the rotations so that we can maximize the grass production - this year we are just glad we have found a farm that works for us in a community that loves us. We have new piggies (as you may know from our Facebook updates). The 10 readheads are all happy and growing in our barn. Soon we will open up a larger pen for them and we will give them access to the front yard but I doubt that with this weather they will venture outside their cozy mound of hay. The ewes are all happy and (hopefully) pregnant. The ram found a way to sneak into the ewes pen (and also to sneak out in the evening ... weird ram!!) so we have no idea what day exactly the ewes were "serviced." We will run a "guess the lambing date" game - the game is less fun that it sounds since we need to be there at lambing to make sure ewes and lambs are okay and if we do not know the date that means a lot of long cold sleepless nights.

We are facing a major dilemma ... the Farm Service Agency (FSA) does NOT want the Siple family to lease us the land for more than 1 year at a time. This makes our job as livestock farmers close to impossible. This limitation is very unfortunate and makes absolutely no sense to us or the Siples. The Siples want us on their farm for EVER, and we want to be there for EVER but FSA (main lender for the Siple Farm) does not seem to think this is a good idea so we are actually forced to keep our eyes open for other properties. How sad. We will let everyone know if we find something different - so far all the animals are cozily anchored down in the barns on South Rd and we are not planning to move them :)

ANd here to finish with some good memories of the season so far - here is a picture of our chickens on the pasture few months back - what a wonderful place we live in!