January 1, 2005

Winter seems adversarial, like it's rooting for the bank. The pastures are frozen and offer nothing to eat, but this is the rule of the season and not unexpected.  Off-pasture since November, the sheep mess in the barn, a 3-sided structure that opens to the southeast and is large enough to enclose a tennis court with a match underway. "15-Love, Sheep" as the morning  sun warms them like a cheering crowd. 

Gone with the Summer is the all-you-can-eat salad bar of Fescue, Red Clover and Bird's Foot Trefoil.  The sheep will eat from my pocket until the grasses green again in March. Hay is the biggest expense of overwintering sheep in the Northeast.  Every week, with an 85 horse power tractor, I feed 3 big-round bales of organic hay that weigh a ton each and cost $40. Not knowing tables the sheep have bad table manners and eat hay messily.  They have no upper incisors so they grasp the hay stalks between their lower teeth and upper gums, then with a slight jerk of the head they pluck it from the compressed bale, eating some, spreading the rest around and trampling that into their droppings.  This barn bedding, compounded of hay, feces and urine, is of great value and will nourish the soil of the gardens when tilled-in come Spring.  

Hay alone does not supply sufficient Winter nutrition; the sheep are supplemented with grain, a corn-oats mixture, that I buy from a local feed mill for $160 a ton. Everyday I feed the flock 200 lbs. of grain,  putting it out in 'feed bunks', low troughs that will accommodate 20 hungry head at once. The ewes devour their ration in minutes. Needing an even a higher plane of nutrition, the growing lambs are fed the corn-oats mix 'free choice' meaning that it is always available to them in their 'creep', a lambs-only feeding pen.  They enter the creep through a latticed panel with openings big enough to let them in but small enough to keep the ewes out.

The sheep need fresh water too; when the heated, self-filling waterers freeze-over I chip the ice away.

Cold hands, cold feet, mine but the sheep are fine outdoors if they have enough to eat and they do; their rumens always come first when money is shy. Farmers complain and if it's not about bad weather, it's about high costs and low prices. I'm a farmer, not that I ever wanted to be, now not wanting to be anything but, and maybe I complain too much. Really, this is the finals at Wimbledon: for the farm, the sheep play the bank, for the creditors.  "Advantage Bank" now and the crowd is on the edge of its seat as the foreclosure officer serves for match point; will those gallant and homey sheep break service? Back and forth, year after year, the volley dizzies, O Deuce! I must enjoy this.

Eugene Wyatt