The Collie Farm Blog

We live on a major migratory path for birds, so we get to enjoy a lot of them during the fall and winter. Lately there have been hundreds of Trumpeter Swans and Snow Geese coming through. They are noisy- day and night- but I enjoy the sound.

Last week in the snow, we encountered this bunch of snow geese in the pasture. My Border Collie Gene spotted them first, and started to walk up on them slowly, like a good working dog.

I lied her down so I could snap pictures of them on the grond, and then when I was ready, I asked her to walk up on them so they would flush, and got a few nice snapshots of them in flight. They are sure beautiful!

The snow was such an ordeal these last few weeks, our region is just not well-equipped to manage in this kind of weather. But it was so pretty, it’s worth the hassle, at least for a little while! Our animals are glad for the melt, however, I think the sheep really prefer fresh grass to hay. Kirk said today the llama was rolling gleefully on her back in the grass today, she seemed so happy to have it back!

Wow, we have a lot of snow– at least for us. I think it’s about a foot deep. Which, I’m sure, seems trivial to people in the Midwest or the East. But in the Northwest, that is a ton– I don’t have many memories of there being this much snow here in my lifetime. We’ve had snow falling for the last week, and more in the forecast for the whole next week- incredible! Usually it doesn’t stick around more than a day or two before melting into a muddy slop. Here is a panoramic photo from the pasture, in which Maggie appears twice– she got in the frame more than once!

The temperatures aren’t bad– a few days it’s gotten into the teens, but it’s mostly hovering right around freezing. We got our first official complaint to animal control about our animals- from a well-meaning citizen who felt concerned for them.  An animal control officer came out to investigate, and chuckled to himself, “well, the DO have wool, after all!” A friend of mine teased me that we should get wool coats for them!

It’s true, the sheep only have a tiny shelter out there, it may not seem like enough to we non-furry humans. But, sheep are amazingly hardy. We are giving them hay, but they are choosing to go paw through the snow to graze, and only picking the hay. (And I swear it’s not moldy or poor– this is a $19 fresh bale from the feed store!) They really look like they’ve grown more wool in the last week or two, they are quite bundled up and puffy. The llama has so much wool insulating her that snow accumulates on her back and stays there– it doesn’t melt! Once a day I break the ice out of their trough with a pickaxe, though I suspect they are getting their water from eating snow and not going to the trough.

Our ducks seem equally unfased by the chilly weather. I put a heat lamp in their house, but they all slept as far away from it as they could get. Their ranging during the day is curtailed because it’s hard for them to walk, but they still get out in the morning, and still bathe when I give them fresh water! Ugh!

The dogs, of course, think the snow is fabulous. Here is a picture of Gene standing on ice in the ditches, barking like crazy. She seemed to know this was incongruous and was demanding our attention and skating all over like a silly, as if to say ” look at me! I’m walking on the water!” They so make us laugh with their cleverness and spunk. Poor Mr. Spanky is getting old, and walking through the snow and ice is harder for him, but he’s always game for it, he just takes it slow.

This month, I’m trying to learn about the differences between the mandatory and voluntary scrapie identification programs for sheep. The voluntary one is more rigorous, and limits what sheep you can bring into your flock, but it can make your sheep more marketable to others who are also in the voluntary program.

I think I want to go this route, but am not sure if I want to wait, to give myself a little more time to buy breeding animals that don’t come from other voluntary farms. I have a huge packet of information from the state veterinarian’s office that explains everything, but it’ s  a lot to wade through! I see that most Katahdin breeders in my state who are members of the national registry association do not participate in the voluntary program. So, it seems it would really limit from whom I could buy sheep if I chose to enroll.

More reading and thinking required!

I mentioned a while back I was shopping for sheep management software and having trouble deciding on (and finding) a product. Since I have such a small flock to start with, it almost seemed silly to need software. But, I am a software engineer, after all, so I like software to organize things. I considered using an Excel spreadsheet to track my animals, and that would work, for a while anyway. But I just saw a lot of limitations to that approach– taking multiple notes on animals, keeping track of pedigrees, and assessing potential inbreeding would not be feasible in Excel.

I finally made myself a scoresheet on features I’d like to see in a flock management software package. #1 on my list was pedigree analysis, because that’s really hard to do on paper. I also wanted “smart ware” that would figure out when lambs are due, and then convert that breeding into a lamb automatically when I enter a birth date. I would have preferred it calculate breed percentages too. Then I needed it to track things: expenses, vet treatments, birth data, sales, purchases, and info from other breeders; as well as inventories and profit/loss data. I wanted a quality user interface where it was easy for me to find all the functions I needed, and good help screens. And, I thought it would be really cool to have it mesh with my Palm Pilot on my phone, so I could collect data in the field, and synch it with my PC.

I ended up evaluting three products first: FlockFiler, ZooEasy, and Sheep Breeder’s Notebook- they all came up most relevant on google searches. But, all three fell down on some important category, for me. FlockFiler’s only big strength was pedidgree analysis (but no inbreeding analysis in the basic version), and some animal tracking; but I just couldn’t jive with the UI. ZooEasy had a slick UI and many nice features, but it did not calculate lambing dates and seemed very bird-centric. SBN was a really nice product, but didn’t do any inbreeding analysis. So, I went back to searching more, and found Ranch Manager by Lion Edge Technologies.

This product does not come up well on google, I never would have found it except for their paid google ads, which appear occasionally. This makes me suspicious of a software product, if the authors have not done adequate search engine optimization (SEO), which should be really easy for software developers to figure out. But, having nothing to lose, I requested an evaluation copy of their product as well. I was enticed by the offering of the Palm Pilot addition, which the other products didn’t offer. But this product was also $200, more than I originally wanted to spend.

I ended up really liking their product, however. It does a nice job of inbreeding analysis, and tracks everything you’d want to know about an animal. The coolest part is that I can keep track of where animals reside, and as soon as I mark a ram as residing in the same pasture location as some ewes, it automatically assumes they’re bred and calcuates the due dates! When they lamb, I can just click a button to note that, and new animals are autmoatically populated with the right pedigree information from the breeding. All making my life easy when I have many more sheep and generations of sheep than I do now!

What finally sold me was that once I entered all the pedigrees of my animals, it showed me common ancestors I hadn’t noticed when poring over paper pedigrees. I don’t have an inbreeding problem-yet, but I would if I didn’t understand these relationships and breed away from them, rather than toward them. So, I bought it.

The Palm Pilot version is really cool, too. Now when I’m in the field, I can take notes about specific animals, and input data on lambs, and synch it with my PC version later. Now that’s modern farming!

Our new wood stove was installed last week, but we can’t use it yet, as it’s missing the heat shield, which is on back-order. Kirk is chomping at the bit to use it, he has a whole stack of barn wood drying under a tarp, just waiting to get in that stove!

Our friends made the hearth, we think it turned out really well. We accidentally chipped  the front of it bringing it in, but they will come and repair it. They made it out of a wood structure  underneath, covered by cement backerboard, and then their own proprietary mix of cement and some other mystery stuff. They colored it to look like slate, which was our request, to match the black stove.

Deciding on its shape was tricky: as you can see, it comes right up to the trim on the French doors on the right, but then has a longer wall on the left. Our first attempt at the pattern, we drew a circle with the center being the corner of the wall. But we couldn’t make that address the clearance requirements in the front without having it encroach on the doorway and the room too much. Next we tried having the circle’s center abut 12″ out from the corner, but of course, still equidistant from both walls, thinking it needed to be symmetrical.

But, it turned out, it didn’t look symmetrical, even though it was; because  the long wall on the left created a visually imbalanced corner. So, we moved the circle center about 6″ to the left. If you study it closely, you can see this, that the circle arcs in more tightly on the right- it is not centered. But, we ended up with the look we wanted- it now seems to be balanced in the corner, oddly enough. Whereas before when it was truly centered, it appeared to be noticeably “off.” It’s funny how the eye can get confused.

We were relieved to get the hearth and see it work there in the corner– it’s always hard to be sure when using a paper template if you really have it right or not, or to envision how that’s going to translate into a real object. We are pleased with the result, the circle joins perfectly to the edge of the door trim. We will change these French doors later to be the style that open outside, instead of in. But, for now, we never use that left-hand door, so there is no risk of it whacking the hearth.

Kirk also sanded and refinishing the floor about a foot out from where the hearth would go. He was figuring, rightly so, that it would be a pain to sand up to that rounded edge later. The type of finish we put down is blend-able; so when we do the rest of the floor later, it should meet up just fine.