The Herd
It was entirely too early for everyone. Like the sun wasn’t even up yet. The rooster didn’t even considering cockle-doodle-doing that’s how early it was. Way too early to be awake, loading up into the car to drive 3 hours away in super cold temperatures. Every fiber of my being wanted to go climb back into our cozy bed with the heater. But we needed those sheep.
Once you get a hankering for the farm life there is no stopping the continuous expansion of your farm critters. We’ve definitely got the bug as I’m sure you’ve gathered in our past few posts introducing all the new members of the family. Bu we still didn’t feel like proper ranchers. Three pigs, three goats, two sheep, and twenty chickens just don’t really scream “ranch operation” to many people and there’s no way we can go running around wearing branded tshirts and brandanas without something to show for it. So we decided we would expand the sheep herd. Jaken did a ton of online shopping trying to find the best deal within driving range and after several weeks of searching he finally came across a small flock of 6 yearling white dorper ewes. They looked incredibly healthy and were going for a good price. So we loaded up in the truck and hit the road.
Three hours (and no food yet) later we pulled up to the address and met up with the seller. She explained that she had decided she wanted to hold onto the black headed ones for show and didn’t need the white headed ones hanging around. That she also had one small dorper Barbados cross she would toss in for a few extra bucks even though she is more of a pet than breeding stock. They weren’t registered which for us right now is no issue, we are just getting started after all.
So we backed our trailer up to the trailer she had gathered them on, opened the doors towards either side to created a chute, picked up one lucky little girl and carried her over, and the rest of the herd followed. It was the easiest transition of livestock we have experienced so far. It honestly felt too good to be true… But we handed over our money, locked up the trailer, loaded back into the truck, and hit the road again.
We didn’t get too far down that road though until we realized something pretty important. We needed gas. The truck usually does okay on gas mileage but pulling the trailer, now full of sheep, over all the hills we were experiencing turned out not to be super great for the gas tank. By the time we realized we were low we had 20 miles to empty and about that many to the next gas station. Talk about poor planning on our part. We were really pushing out luck which historically has not been on our side. Every time the map updated a .1 mile closer the truck display dropped a mile in remaining gas. Things were getting pretty intense till the Exxon side peeked over the next hill beckoning us home. Jaken did his best to both encourage the truck to drive and not over extend the small amount of gas we had left. We quite literally rolled into the gas station on fumes but we made it. Barely.
Once we filled the truck back up our next concern was food. I do not do well on an empty stomach and was starting to get rather cranky. It wasn’t as quick as I would have liked but we eventually found a McDonalds with a parking lot that was trailer friendly that we could maneuver into and to our delight, a play plave. After sleeping for three hours there this morning and another hour back so far Hope was getting super restless and just needed to run. We got inside and she took off, she had the whole play area to herself so while I ordered our food Jaken went and introduced her to the wonders of the slide. She had a wonderful time burning off her charged energy and got a bite to eat before we continued the trek home.
Once home we had our cousin Kristen and her kiddos come over to assist with the tagging, worming, and unloading. The kids did a great job helping load the tagging clamp, the drench gun, and administering the tags and meds to each new herd member.
Once everyone was squared away we shifted the goats over to our electric netting with the Tunis sheep and let the new sheep out into the permanent pen. It is so heart warming to see our herd grow and watch them graze the pasture. We have nine sheep in total now and we finally feel like ranchers.
