Walk this way

Though it hasn’t yet showed up on the calendar, to the knowing eye Spring has arrived here on the farm already. The soaking rain which hit us earlier in the week pretty much wiped out our snow pack so that all of the farm’s Herdsires, show animals, and weaners at the two lower barns are happily out nibbling on the remains of last fall’s pastures. With the loss of the ice and snow off of the shed roofs at the Arena, the animals at that barn are also able to get back out onto the dry lot we have set up there for the first time in over a month, now that the threat of a half ton of snow burying someone alive is no longer present.

Meanwhile Jen and Kim have been furiously working on halter training the female weanlings scheduled to go to the NAAS in just a few weeks time. Just a few more to go and then they’ll take on the young fellas. Personally, I know spring is just around the corner when I look up from a cup of coffee in our kitchen and there’s my wife walking a somewhat recalcitrant female up onto our porch, using our house’s landscaping as a de facto obstacle course. It may be a slightly unorthodox training technique but it’s hard to argue with the results it’s produced over the past several years. With the snow pack gone, the road — at least from the Stud Barn to the Main Barn where the training action takes place –has even showed signs over the past day or two of finally drying up, which is always a good thing.  Watching the newbie show animals, particularly the white ones, alligator role in 2″ of mud can be rather disheartening. In any case, all things being equal I’ll even be walking some young females myself before the weekend is out, just helping to work out some final kinks and in the process exposing the rookies to a new face as well. As it is, they all theoretically need to be able to follow a slack lead with any one of 5 possible handlers at the North American, so quiet repetition and desensitization is the name of the game. We’re getting there for sure.

Another sign of spring is that Jen and I have also started to think — at least in the abstract — about our breeding list for the coming season. Part of that discussion inevitably comes back particularly to the question of which females from the 2011 and 2012 birth classes will ultimately join the ranks of the production herd here and who they might displace from elsewhere in the established herd. Our herd size normally fluctuates between 200 and 300 animals depending upon the time of year. Even though we could theoretically birth out fully this year and still be in that range, that is definitely not the plan and in any case this is the in-house chess game which we play (and frankly love) on an ongoing basis. We want to sell enough high quality animals to support the farm and make some money while also retaining enough new animals from our previous production to both keep improving the overall quality our genetic base and keep the average age of the herd down. No doubt that we are spoiled though.  With the quality that the program has produced over the past few years, trying figuring out who goes where in the long term is definitely a lovely dilemma to have!

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