colin gets the vote!

added by David on Monday May 9, 2011 at 10:18 pm

When choosing a sheepdog puppy, I like look for the cleverest, bravest most adventurous puppy in the litter, so I’m still don’t know how I’ve been talked into keeping Colin! Of all of the pups in Fly’s recent liter Colin was undoubtedly the odd one out, which was how he came to be given such a silly name. But the rest of the family thought he was great and he soon became their favorite pup. Colin for his part was milking that attention for all it was worth. I suspect that he spotted that his litter-mates were fast disappearing to new homes, so playing the loveable fool would increase his chances of being able to stay put.

So once again I’ve been out voted in the house and yesterday my own favoured dog pup ‘Bud’ went off to a new home, leaving the soppiest, daftest looking (and cuddliest) collie pup in the litter, Colin, to carry the responsibility of being the next ‘great thing’ in the pack.

Well actually that’s not quite true, I wasn’t entirely out voted, as I was allowed to keep Zola as well. She’s not at all cuddly, or particularly cute, but she has already started chasing the chickens and eyeing the sheep…… Now that’s what I call a lovable pup!!

This is Colin!   colin

 

 

the end of lambing

added by David on Monday May 2, 2011 at 10:23 pm

I often say that the best lambs of the year are the first and the last, the rest just seem to disappear into a complete blur. It’s been a pretty good lambing season this year, mainly because of the amazing weather. Our first lambs were born in the last week in March, these lambs are now six weeks old and have hardly felt rain on their backs!  Lamb numbers have been quite good too. We’ll never produce as many lambs from our Romney ewes as you can from other breeds of sheep, but as much of the farm is of  poor grazing, I still believe that we are best off aiming to produce an average of one and a half lambs from each ewe. It’s not just the weather that makes for a  good lambing, the flock was in excellent condition this year, which meant that they lambed with plenty of milk and produced good sized lambs.

So all in all it’s been a good year and has set us on course for a successful 2011. But when you are a farmer you always need something to worry (moan) about and at the moment it’s the lack of rain. It has hardly rained at Borough Farm since February and the ponds are already dry. So we are either in for the worst drought ever, or else (and more likely) it’s going to start raining and not stop all summer! So we’d better make the most of  this dry weather while it lasts.

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new homes for Fly’s pups

added by David on Sunday April 24, 2011 at 11:01 pm

It only seems a minute ago that I wrote about the arrival of Fly’s pups. It was in fact seven weeks ago, and  since then we’ve been busy with the lambing and the lambing open days. The weeks have gone by in a flash and the pups are now nine weeks old, more than old enough to move onto their new homes.

All seven were given names by my family so that we can identify them. Kate was the first to go at the beginning of  last week. She has gone to Tim, a local friend of mine. I’ve been helping Tim to train sheepdogs since he was 13. Now, 14 years later he’s rather good at it, and he visits with his dogs every week, so we’ll be seeing plenty of Kate. Fred is going to another friend Chris, a little further away. Chris had a puppy from me twelve years ago… Fern’s brother!!

Pup 3 Betty has gone to work on a farm on Exmoor, with nearly 1000 sheep, and pup 4, Buster will be going to another local sheep farmer, Richard (his wife Jo is our dogs vet, so he should be well looked after!)

That leaves 3 pups. Zola, Budd and Colin. I want to keep a couple at Borough Farm to start with, so that I have the best chance possible of keeping a really good worker. One of those to be kept will definitely be Zola, but there is much debate in our house as to whether Budd or Colin is to be the second. Budd looks a lot like his father ( a good thing I think) but Colin is the soppiest, cuddliest, sweetest looking pup of the litter. So the rest of the family have decided that he must be the one to keep!

I’ll let you know what has been decided in a couple of weeks!

here’s Zola and Budd

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lambing again

added by David on Friday April 1, 2011 at 11:00 pm

The lambing season is now well underway, and the barns are alive with the sounds of bleating lambs. Between the various members of the family we manage to keep watch for nearly  twenty four hours a day, although ‘keeping watch’ might not be the right term.

There is always something that needs to be done in a lambing shed. Once the ewes have given birth they are moved to a small individual pen, and the navels of the new born lambs are dressed with iodine to prevent disease. Here we check that the lambs are feeding, and that the ewe doesn’t reject one of her lambs as sometimes happens. If all is well the ewe and her lambs are marked with the same number potential breeding ewe lambs are identified, then ewe with lambs are moved in a trailer out to the fields. As the whole precess has to be repeated 700 times, you can imagine that it keeps us all busy.

And with the lambing open days starting next week, we’re also trying to get the barns ship shape. If you are planning to come along we look forward to seeing you, out first open day is April 9th and runs through to the 17th April. If you want to see a lamb born your best chance will be in the first half of the week.

This year’s first set of quads.

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breeding success?

added by David on Thursday March 10, 2011 at 11:25 pm

One of the frustrations of sheep farming is that next year is always a year away! So when you are trying to improve the breeding of the sheep progress is slow. You have to be patient to see the result of breeding decisions, and it really takes several years before you can really tell if changes made are  proving successful.

In Autumn 2009 I decided on an experiment to put a few of my Romney ewes in lamb to a Blue Faced Leicester ram. The Blue Face is a strange sheep, the breed itself is ’soft’ in the extreme, meaning that it is difficult to keep flesh on and liable to succumb to even the slightest adverse weather. But when it is crossed with other pure breeds, the resulting ewe lambs can make fine breeding sheep.

The early signs of the experiment have been encouraging, so much so that last autumn I bought some more Blue Faced rams. Over three hundred Romney ewes are now expecting Blue faced Leicester lambs. Last years lambs are now nearly a year old, I had them into the pens last week for vaccination, worming and docking (removing the wool from the back ends)  I’m really pleased with the way that they are looking with long straight backs, proud heads and well fleshed backs. In a years time these sheep will be expecting their first crop of lambs, and that will be the first indication as to whether they will be the sort of breeding ewes which we are looking for. So by 2015 I should really be able to see if the decision that I made last autumn has been a success.


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welcome arrivals

added by David on Thursday March 10, 2011 at 10:56 pm

Last week saw a long awaited event, the arrival of Fly’s first ‘proper’ litter of pups. I say proper as, you might remember that last spring Fly produced a single pup Alfie much to our surprise.

But this time it was no surprise as I’d taken Fly away to be mated back in December. The father called ‘Laddie’ belongs to a friend of mine, Derek Scrimgeour. Laddie is Jakes full brother and was English National Sheepdog champion in 2008.

So we were all delighted at the arrival of four dogs and three bitches, all with beautiful black and white markings. Fly is being a great mum, although she is already deciding that she should return to work part time.  At present they are all keeping warm in the kitchen, where they get plenty of attention from the family. They’ve all been given names Bet, Zola, Jen, Gus, Bruiser, Bud and Colin (you’d have to ask my daughter where the name Colin came from!) They’ve all got a lifetime of work ahead of them on farms in North Devon, but for the moment, we can just enjoy the very special new arrivals.

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Alfie’s shoulder

added by David on Friday February 18, 2011 at 12:04 pm

It’s been over 2 weeks since I wrote about the problems of Alfie’s shoulder and although I don’t want to tempt fate, I thought that I could afford to write that we are all feeling cautiously optimistic. He’s now back in training and although I’m only taking him out to sheep a few times a week, he’s doing plenty of running on his daily walks and so far he’s not showing any sign of further lameness in his shoulder. He is however, showing all the  signs of being just as eccentric as his father, he has an obsession with the yard broom and yesterday he took the broom with him on his entire walk around the field. So even if he can’t round the sheep up, he should be able to sweep them up!

Fingers crossed that Alfie’s shoulder problems are behind us!

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a shortage of silage

added by David on Sunday February 6, 2011 at 8:28 pm

Some older farmers will say that on the 1st of February you should have half of your winter feed still left in the barn. In other words the winter may still have a long way to go. I’d like to think that they are being a little on the pessimistic side. The north Devon climate is generally a mild, if rather wet and windy. On the 1st of March I do think that can at least think about the coming spring!

However with most of the lambing ewes now housed for the winter, the stack of silage bales is going down rather fast. Last summer was a tricky time to make silage and hay, June and the first half of July were very dry and the fields that we cut yielded only a light amount of grass. In late July the weather changed and there were only a few spells of weather dry enough to bale the silage.

My latest calculations are that we should just about have enough silage to get us through to the spring. I’m currently feeding about a tonne of silage a day, adn that will decrease later in the ewes pregnancy as the unborn lambs take up more of the available space inside the ewes. During the last few weeks of pregnancy the ewes requirement for protein and energy goes sky high, so we feed a high quality pellet, with the silage just there as a bit of extra bulk. So fingers are crossed that March sees some warm sunny weather, and that we can turn the ewes out with lambs at foot to a good early bite of grass.

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an Alfie crisis

added by David on Thursday February 3, 2011 at 5:16 pm

Alfie is fast winning the heart of everyone at Borough Farm, he’s got loving eyes, a fantastic nature, he’s clever and obedient, and although he’s only eight months old he’s showing an amazing ability with the sheep. He seems to have a quiet authority and he picks up his commands in just a couple of lessons. All in all he’s a bit of a dream!

So imagine the panic when he seemed to be developing a chronic lameness in one of his front legs. Not the sort of lameness caused him to carry the leg altogether, just a tenderness that reappeared three or four times over the period of a fortnight.

My real reason for concern was a condition called Osteochondrits Disseans (OCD) It’s an inherited condition whereby a piece of cartilage protrudes into the joint socket. We’d had a pup with the condition several years ago, and despite an operation on each shoulder, he eventually had to go to a pet home, as the stresses of work would have proved too much for his joints.

So with some trepidation I took Alfie down to Argyle vets in Braunton, where Jo Dyer is usually pretty good at dealing with any sheep dog dramas.

An initial examination only confirmed a tenderness in one of his front shoulders, I had to book him in for an x-ray a couple of days later, and returned home.

Things were tense on the day of the x-ray. So when Jo rang late in the day I was mighty relieved to hear that although not 100% sure, she thought that his shoulders were probably ok. He was prescribed two weeks rest and a course of anti inflammatory tablets. If there was any re occurrence of the lameness after that, she would need to make further investigations. A couple of weeks have passed and this week Alfie has returned to light training. I’m on tender hooks, delighted with the way his work is progressing, but anxious about his shoulders. It’s so far so good, but i won’t really feel confident that the lameness has passed for several months. We’ve all got our fingers crossed at the moment

 

Alfie’s shoulder x ray

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there snow dogs like sheepdogs

added by David on Sunday January 2, 2011 at 8:02 pm

Whilst us shepherd’s were shivering, and the flock sheltered from icy winds,  it’s good to know that not everyone on the farm is bothered by the recent sub zero temperatures. The Borough farm sheepdogs seem to be completely unaffected by the bone chilling cold, in fact they barely seem to notice. When old Gail was turned out of the kitchen after the first night of snow, she treated the new white world with complete indifference. She clearly thought that she’d seen it all before, which of course she has seen snow before, but only a couple of times so you would have thought that she might show some excitement.

For Alfie (six months old) the snow was a new experience, and he briefly raced happily around the yard, but after biting a couple of mouthfuls he convinced himself that snow was of limited entertainment value, and carried on the rest of the day as if nothing had changed.

But for Jake  the snow did provide a particular problem. Ever since he was a puppy he has been obsessed with the excavation of mole hills. He dives on them, digs them, or attacks with his nose at high speed. I have always lived in fear that he will one day attempt this particular trick on a frozen mole hill, so the covering of snow did at least cover the earth mounds and protect Jake from a painful nose related accident.

But any thought that the snow would also deprive Jake of his favorite pass time, would be to underestimate his devotion to this particular duty. As Jake would say ’snow or no snow there’s some jobs that just have to be done’ …. the picture says it all!!


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