Paddock condition?

Remember when it was cold in the Northeast last weekend? Yeah, shocking but true it is still — at least according to the calendar — winter here, yet we have all been made so soft by the mild temperatures of the past couple of months that when Mother Nature actually acted normally we all started behaving as though we’d been dropped off at the south pole. Temps in February below 20 degrees Fahrenheit! How novel.

Not that we were going to let that 36 hour cold snap go to waste. Instead we bundled up and Jen, Kimberly, and I spent some time Sunday and Monday taking fleece photos of all of last year’s birth class (ages 3 to 6.5 months) as well as many of the yearlings from 2010. The result is a permanent record we can use in the years ahead for reference both just on an individual animal basis (how did Tenacious look in 2012 vs. 2014, assuming of course that my Mayan friends are full of hooey on that end-of-the-world stuff) as well as comparing them to their siblings, offspring, parents, etc…Above all it’s also just really fun going around and getting a little snapshot of what last year’s production looks like now as we go about weaning the majority of them.

There is some concern here in the short term about the effect that the recent three week dry spell is starting to have on the fleeces at the Main Barn. The compost we put onto the surrounding pastures there late last fall is all sitting there on the surface in a very dry and flakey form.  Unfortunately our once and future show animals seem to think that there are few things more glorious in all of their existence than going out and rolling in the stuff.  Which really wasn’t so much of a problem back when they only had 2″ or so of growth, as the fleeces weren’t opening up and letting much of that debris inside. Mind you this is not an argument for breeding away from good staple lengths but the reality is that now that many of the older animals in particular are at 4+” of growth on their blankets it’s all of a sudden not quite so funny. The animals up at that barn are coated in the compost debris that in a normal year would still be under (at least) a 6 inch snow pack. Not that this is the end of the world. Or maybe it is. Again, ask the Maya. All this means is that we are forced to think about managing the show critters a few weeks earlier than when we normally would in early March. The show rules say they want animals walking into the ring in paddock condition. Perhaps they should be careful what they ask for.

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