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Hi-- What suggestions do people have for storing round hay bales outside? I am having four delivered this weekend, and do not have any indoor barn space. What has worked best for folks?

If the slaughter people do their job right, there will be no "woosh"--the whole digestive aparatus will come out intact.

I found that my ewe lambs were just as likely to mount each other as the ram lamb was. Everyone was mounting everyone else.....

If you have time, you might check out auctions. I was at a small livestock auction the other day, and there was an enormous pile of wire cages that sold for about $2/cage.

We just culled a ewe that only could be milked on one side. There was a hard lump the size and shape of a chicken egg right underneath her teat. Yes, she did successfully raise her lamb (that's her and her lamb in my profile picture), but it was really scary when her milk came in and that side...

Well, maybe I'll make my paddocks VERY small and let them sit there for multiple days...... OR try to rearrange my thinking about it and embrace it as a winter forage?

I would really really like to get rid of the fescue, but we don't have any way to disc it, and I'm not going to poison it. I don't suppose there's any way to transition the pasture in any other way? I went around to any little bare place (between fescue clumps, for example) last summer, and put...

Thanks, Baymule, I've tried to do the fecal egg count from instructions on the internet, following all the directions, but I really need someone to actually show me, as I'm not sure I'm doing the focusing right. The samples I've looked at (with the McAllister slides) appeared to have either...

How much space do you give them? Don't they pick up a lot of worms that way?

Thank you so much for this reply--it is VERY helpful!!! I do walk my pastures--every day, where the sheep are. When I move them (daily or every other day), I look at what they've eaten, what they've trampled, and what they've left). If there are any bare patches (in the places where there has...

I was wondering about what to do in droughts, or natural pasture slow-downs, like now, in late October. Greg Judy says when the grass is growing fast, move them fast, and when the grass is going slow, move them slow, but if they're spending more time in a single paddock, they're eating it down...

In Kansas, we have clover blooming pretty much from June through late October. It was really gratifying to see it all coming up again fresh and green after being grazed down to the ground by the sheep (too small of a paddock, evidently), even now, in October. Also, I was incredibly gratified...

This is a GREAT article and gives me much hope for the future of my pasture. I think Greg Judy is great, but I don't have a lot of patience for his videos. Yes, he has really good things to say, but he's a talker, and it often takes a long time to get to the "meat." Like Bay, I prefer...

I'm really liking this idea of making berms from the downed trees (of which we do and will have plenty). Rather than using the tractor blade to scrape out swales and shape berms, use the wood to slow the run-off of water and soil where our grass is thin and nutrients lacking. We're planning to...

I know this post was a long time ago, but I don't think it quite works that way. There's more to drought resilience than just letting the grass grow tall. Something else is happening in the soil that both keeps it green and allows it to grow so tall. Most likely he has tons of organic matter...

It doesn't sound like cruelty to me--it sounds like having sheep in their natural habitat. This has basically been our management plan as well, though I do have a little shade shelter that I drag between paddocks in the heat of the summer, which they crowd into (it gets REALLY hot in the summer...

Unfortunately, I didn't butcher our one lamb myself, but took him to be processed by a meat-processing person. But if we ever do our own, I'll certainly check it out.

Yikes! Yes, there are nursing lambs, but they're all super-healthy, great growth. I'm actually thinking that it's probably not where they were back in June, because there's none of it in there--just in a little area between one pasture and that one that I didn't let them in because there were...

I'm also wondering now about earlier this summer when they went through there, and basically cleaned it all out. I identified black snakeroot, which is supposed to be bitter, but not harmful. Did they eat the white snakeroot too? And if so, will that make their meat toxic? How long does the...