Kyle Farms All Natural Lamb

Well, its a new year, 2010, and a nice cold January to boot.  Here at Kyle Farms, January brings snow, cold, wind, lambs!  As of today lambing has started with a trickle.  We've had 4 lambs born so far, and all singles :-(  Hopefully things will start to pick up in the next couple of weeks.  On the plus side, the new-ish barn has been completed and all the fall ewe lambs and their guard dog puppy companions have been moved in!  This made room for more late pregnant ewes to be moved off of pasture yesterday and into the barn.  Lambing season should be condensed this year as we paid very close attention to when ALL the rams came out.  It seems like after every breeding season when we're checking body condition on the early bred ewes, someone finds a ram who managed to avoid being removed with the rest of the boys.  Hopefully lambing season will be a condensed 40-50days this season.  

Along with the pregnant ewes who are slowly getting moved into the barn as they're 2-3wks from lambing, all of the spring ewe lambs, and all of the ewes that lambed in the fall are out on pasture.  This means the warmest job on the farm these days is spending 5 hours in the tractor feeding the pastures. Last year we invested in a bale spreader that will unwind round bales on pasture, making feeding ewes in the snow much easier than unrolling bales by hand.  Also out on pasture are a large group of lambs that came this fall to be fed out on our extra pastures as the farm they're from doesn't have any winter pastures.  This means a lot of hay is fed every other day, rain, snow or wind.  

As you can see in the picture we're trying electronet fencing this year to utilize some old pastures without reliable fencing.  Its working great!  The ewes really respect the fence (always stay about 2ft away) and are chewing down some pastures that haven't been used in 10 years.