Over a decade ago I posted about the pros and cons of castrating some of your Soay rams: in a nutshell, no worries about accidental breeding, more mellow fellows in the fields, more flexibility in butchering, and having a companion for non-breeding rams left behind or injured rams or ewes, versus losing the statuesque horns […]
This is only my second eulogy in over a decade of blogging, thank goodness. Several years ago I wrote about my country veterinarian father. Doc Peterson was scary smart, hard-working, loyal, committed to safeguarding the livestock under his care, and definitely not the urban sort. Our first and only border collie, Molly, could be described […]
Last year we lost the gender lottery on lambs (3 ewes, 8 rams) and this year our first four lambs were rams, so we find ourselves with an excess of rams, both proven flock sires and yearlings ready to breed this fall. We would like to be your source of a new flocksire or two, […]
I leave my Soay flock to their own devices today in order to talk about an essential part of any heritage sheep operation – predator control. For today’s essay, livestock guardian dogs, or LGDs. In the last 14 years, we have acquired nine LGDs: two mixed Maremma/Anatolian/Great Pyrenees and then a wonderful succession of seven […]
Of the hundreds of questions we’ve been asked over the last 13 years of raising heritage sheep, none is as vexing as “How will I know whether I need to trim a ram’s horns and do I really need to trim his horns?” It’s a rare issue, but when it arises, it matters. A horn […]
We usually list all our sheep for sale on the big farm website, but that requires Steve to be inside at his desk and right now he’s busy outside getting ready to set our breeding groups, so here goes. We have two adult ewes for sale, both of whom lambed this year for the first […]