Kyle Farms All Natural Lamb

I wanted to share a picture some of our gorgeous new fall lambs.  These lambs are in a jug (small pen) with their mother to help her keep track of them for the first 2 days of life.

Moving a group of ewes down the road with a border collie herding and directing the flock and a handler in a truck following behind 

Well its officially the last day of summer, and our ewes have started lambing!

 About a third of the flock was officially bred to lamb this fall, however the ewes bred for late spring were run with clean up rams to catch any girls who didn't take.  This means more work for us, as there are multiple groups of ewes that may be getting ready to lamb, but it also means more lambs available for the winter holiday markets!

In the Genesee Valley the weather for our fall lambing season is so variable, that we bring our girls into barns to lamb, generally three weeks prior to them being due.  This means that every three weeks, all ewes that have the potential to be pregnant are sorted through our handling system and checked for udder development and other signs of late pregnancy.  They are then brought into the barns and fed ensiled summer hay supplemented with local grain for the ewes who may need some additional nutritional support.  However, after summer on our pastures, most of these ewes don't see any grain. 

Any ewes that aren't determined to be due within the next three weeks, are put back out on pasture and may be put in with the group that has the rams breeding for early spring lambs.  

This process will repeat itself until 2-3weeks after the last calculated lambing date, or until all ewes due to lamb have lambed, or are diagnosed as open.

New photo gallery for Kyle Farms!!

 We're getting more and more tech savy every day :-)

photos.kylefarmsnys.com 

Kyle Farms is..... 

Now taking orders for all natural fall finished lamb! Please visit www.kylefarmsnys.com for information on placing an order for all natural locally raised whole or half lamb. CSA subscriptions are available for purchase year around for Fall Lambs! 

Available in Whole ($300) or Half ($175) Shares! 

A Whole Share provides approx. 50-60lbs of freezer ready lamb 

A Half Share provides 25-30lbs of freezer ready lamb 

We believe that a healthy environment is essential for the growth and development of our all natural lamb. These lambs and their mothers are housed on grass with unlimited access to fresh, clean water to take advantage of the nutritious pastures of the Genesee Valley. Raising our lambs in open air on clean, dry pastures allows us to produce healthy lambs without the use of antibiotics or artificial hormones. This guarantees that there is no risk of antibiotic residues in the lamb you purchase from Kyle Farms. 

Thank You! 
www.kylefarmsnys.com 

The saying goes, "It takes a village...."  And for us I'd change it to, "It takes a community...."  

 (To raise adorable lambs like this)

This is going to be a thank you to all those who help us out throughout the year, and also a reminder for everyone else with farms (small or large) that making and keeping good relationships with your neighbors can be of immense importance.  

Its easy to overlook all the outside inputs to Kyle Farms when you're involved in a day to day basis and it becomes commonplace, but when we stop and think about it, there are very few large projects that aren't done with the help of friends and neighbors.  

The entire flock was shorn over the past three weeks, and at one point we had 3 shearing machines running.  The weather however was not as organized as we were.  In order to shear a dry flock in a dry location, a neighbor graciously let us use an empty barn adjacent to the pastures where the unshorn sheep were, saving us from having to haul the sheep to one of our barns or shearing outside in the rain.  In order to run three shearing machines, electricity had to be provided in the form of generators.  Being a relatively low input sheep farm we had no generators, and were able to borrow THREE generators from various local farms to power the shearing machines, wool baler, and various other electric equipment (lights, etc).  Just thinking back on that, I can't imagine how difficult it would have been to haul the ewes, load by load, to the shearing barn, and then back after being shorn to the pasture.  And the amount of fuel used by the generators....much less than the amount used by the farm truck to haul heavy trailer loads of sheep back and forth all weekend. 

To shear the sheep efficiently and quickly requires atleast 2-3 shearers and we are lucky to know many excellent shearers who are willing to come shear for us.  However, when running three shearing machines it triples the amount of work for whoever is assisting.  In our case, ATLEAST 2-3 people are needed to help keep up with the shearers.  Someone to haul sheep to the shearers, someone to sweep up the wool and do some basic skirting, and someone to run the wool baler.  So if one person falls sick, or is unable to work, it can really throw a wrench in things.

This is where the community really steps in.  The Saturday shearing goes great, they shear all day and get a good part of the flock done.  Sunday, a shearer and an assistant are unable to work, and after a few quick calls around, a visiting farmer who shears and some friends of the farm show up to get the shearing done.  

Sure it takes a bit longer, and for a farm with only a few employees to have everyone and their friends shearing or helping shear until 8 at night means everything else falls to the wayside until afterwards, but without those friends and neighbors, we'd have still been shearing Monday.  The same goes for our relationship with local farms.  Without their help we wouldn't have had generators or barn to shear in the most convenient and least stressful spot.

I could go on and on about the multitude of times Kyle Farms Saturday and Sunday projects have benefited from our friends and neighbors  help and availability.  Whether it be while vaccinating and processing lambs, or fixing the water pump for a barn full of pregnant ewes in July (and providing the portable water tank to supply them with water until it could be fixed).  This spring time we would like to thank the community for their help and friendship.

End of long ramble

Summary: Make and keep good relationships with your local farms and neighbors.  You never know when you might need their help or they might need yours. 

I'm trying to post an entry every Monday, and unfortunately the past week has been relatively uneventful.  Shearing of the ewes due to lamb in the next couple of weeks happened 2 weeks ago, and the rest of the flock is waiting patiently for the combination of nice weather and available shearers.  The late spring lambing ewes are starting to bag up and look closer to lambing, and everyone is starting to think about field and equipment preparation for planting and haying.  Its currently a waiting game.

 Since waiting games aren't very interesting to write about, or read for that matter, I thought I would introduce the backgrounds of the ewes at Kyle Farms.  

Dorset/Finn cross ewes are the basis of the flock with the ideal being a 3/4 Dorset, 1/4 Finn sheep.  The Dorset base is valued for producing a high quality meat lamb with good bone, muscling and growth rates.  They also are very good mothers and raise their lambs well with little assistance.  Crossing Dorset ewes with Finn sheep increases the number of lambs that a ewe has per lambing as the Finn sheep are renowned for their fertility and often have 4-5 lambs at a time.  Finn sheep are also smaller slighter sheep and this makes the ewes easier to handle and move (pick up) by one person.  

Suffolk rams may on occasion be used on ewes that did not lamb with their lambing group to produce meat lambs and occasionally a ewe lamb out of this cross is kept as a replacement.  Affectionately known as dirty faced ewes, there are a few black faced cross ewes in the flock.  

Our ram flock is made up of purebred Dorset, Finn, and Ile de France rams with some home bred cross rams kept every year to maximize the hybrid vigor provided by our Dorset/Finn crosses.  The Ile de France rams produce a lovely meat lamb with great hind quarter muscling and excellent growth on mother's milk and grass.  

Rare breeds at Kyle Farms

Kyle Farms was home for a time to a small flock of Romanov ewes and rams.  Romanov sheep are very fertile and are known for the large numbers of lambs they will have in litters.  Their crosses with traditional white faced sheep are generally very fertile, can lamb throughout the year and raise white, wooled lambs.  Unfortunately they are more susceptible to feet problems than the rest of our flock and require more attention at lambing than we expect to provide our ewes and so have been fazed out of the flock.   

As spring slowly shows its head and the flocks are getting sorted, shorn, and moved to green spring pastures, there is one indispensable worker on the farm that needs to be mentioned, the Border Collie

Kyle Farms currently employs one Border Collie, Pete, who's skills and work ethic are extraordinarily important to the farm.  Peter is an 8 year old, male, tricolor Border Collie.  He will single handedly fetch and move groups of ewes from pastures, woods, and gullies and with the assistance of a person on foot or 4-wheeler will move the flock where ever they need to go.  The lambing manager says that Pete is amazing in his ability to recognize which ewe needs to be caught to go in a jug and to find and keep the ewe close enough to be caught and penned with her lambs (an amazing help with confused, scatterbrained yearlings).  Without dogs to move and manage the flock in open pastures and through sorting systems, management procedures would take much longer and require a lot more "person" power.