Graze naked

The juvenile females off the north side of the CCNF Main Barn this afternoon. After exceptional rainfalls of late, the farm has more grass than we can keep up with at this moment. It's a matter of trying to get the animals to the grass!
The juvenile females off the north side of the CCNF Main Barn this afternoon. After exceptional rainfalls of late, the farm has more grass than we can keep up with. It’s a matter of trying to get the animals *to* the grass!

The herd at CCNF has actually been shorn for almost 2 weeks now, though it’s telling of how full life has been that this is the first mention I’ve made of it here. After doing 2 days of shearing at the start of the month, our shearer, Matt Best, came back here on Monday the 12th to finish up the final 66 animals. Not long afterward, we were able to finally let loose the grazing hounds and the vast majority of the herd now has access to pasture on a 24 hour basis.

We in fact have one feed group made up of 50+ adult females that are all either due with crias later in the summer or are maidens that we won’t begin breeding until around the 1st of July. We are rotating that spring grazing strike force through the outer paddocks of the farm — sans man-made shelters — in an attempt to keep up with the rapid spring growth in our pastures. Soon enough members of that group will be peeled off as some of them come back inside the Arena for birthing and/or breeding. But for the time being their combined grazing ability makes them seem like a large group of cute, fluffy locusts. With that stock density, they can take down the grass in even our best paddocks over the course of just 5 or 6 days so we are rotating them quite often. Why mow it when they can graze it after all?

In the mean time, cria watch is officially on and we are putting eyes on the maternity ward every morning at 6, a final time at night before we go to bed ourselves, and of course several times in between. While Bliss, our first girl due if the breeding calendar is to be believed, has given us a couple of false starts, as of this afternoon we are still cria-free for 2014. That of course could all change in a hurry. Hope everyone out there is having a good Memorial Day weekend! Now time for some pizza and beer…

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