The Last Shed

The night before the last day of shearing. The last mob of sheep need penning up in the shed.

Some of us have maintained our enthusiasm.

This is the fun of farming. All of us together, kicking up dust and chasing shadows, the residue of the summer heat fading under the clear starry sky.

Shearing 2011- or, A Bug’s Life Part 3: The Final Solution

I love shearing.

The atmosphere, the sheepwork, the process of reaping what we’ve grown all year.

The challenge of trying to capture it all on a camera.

I‘ve tried before: Last year, the year before and the year before that (more than once)

The Farmkids love shearing too.

Two fun-filled weeks or so of hanging out together.

The excitement and energy of the shed.

Sheep, sheep and more sheep.

Creating their own entertainment

Hide ‘n seek among the wool bales

This year the kids helped me out with some photography.

They documented things from a new perspective.

Some shots I would have taken…

Some photo opportunities I hadn’t ever noticed.

So we start with woolly sheep by the shedful.

They come into the yards and shed early to empty out and stay dry.

The shearers set to work, just a few minutes per sheep and the wool comes off

The fleece is collected by the rouseabout (or shedhand)

It goes onto the classing table to be skirted (all the dirty, scrappy bits around the edges taken off) and classed (assessed for important traits like fibre diameter, length, strength, cleanliness and colour)

The sheep head out five kilograms lighter

Some stay around for a quick drench

The end product, classed and collected up

Pressed into bales (and I think R would like me to point out that this is the old, semi-retired press, not the nice new one with all the bells and whistles and safety gadgets. Of course we only let the kids play with the old one. We figure that if they survive with all limbs intact they are qualified to use the new one)

At nearly 200 kilograms a bale, it’s serious business when you have to move them around…

for example, to retrieve the boss’s sunnies:

Three years later, Farmboy and his dad’s sunnies just slay me

Yep, we love shearing.

A Bug’s Life, Part II: A Quick Wash, Cut and Blowfly

Blowies. Australian sheep blowfly. Lucilia cuprina. There’s a few other varieties, but the nasty ones lay their eggs on our sheep, and their hideous maggot spawn burrow through healthy tissue and basically eat the sheep alive. Most commonly, it’s the daggy area around the sheep’s bums, known as the breech, but this year the blowies seem super-aggressive, and are getting into any damp areas of wool on the sheep bodies. This is “body strike”, and seems to kill sheep much faster than breech strike. It’s also harder to prevent with crutching and worming to keep breech areas clean. At this point it’s probably coming down to when you shear and your flock’s natural resistance to flystrike, which is something for which many breeders are selecting. We have been jetting (soaking sheep in chemicals to repel flies and kill maggots), but in the months before shearing, we have to consider long wool and withholding periods and are essentially limited to spinosyn (Extinosad), which only lasts about 3 weeks.

Ah, jetting! It’s usually a nice opportunity to cool down in the warm spring weather, as long as you don’t mind your refreshing spritz laced with insect poisons.

This spring was wet enough that none of us really appreciated the extra moisture. It was hard to find enough dry spells to jet all the sheep, and many of them needed doing twice. If it rains on freshly jetted sheep, the chemical may wash off, and bringing damp sheep into the yards to press up against each other is a recipe for dermo. And splashing through stagnant lakes of sheep poo isn’t the most pleasant working environment.

What do you reckon, boys? Fancy a splash around under the fire hose?

Wet enough for you, Bill?

Muddy, Muddy?

Sheep aren’t over keen on their mud manicure, either.

The full spa treatment isn’t optional.

The other fly control technique we’ve been doing a lot of lately is crutching. I wrote about it once before (here), and that post is probably the most popular on my blog, which possibly indicates something about my readership and their level of interest in mucky sheep bottoms. I get a lot of hits from people looking for “horny lambs” too.

Anyway, wet spring means sudden profusion of green feed (and worms), and that means sheep get upset tummies, and that can leave their rear ends a bit on the messy side. Flies love messy sheep bottoms, so as part of our attempt to prevent flystrike, we’ve been doing a lot of crutching. Of course, when I say “we’ve been doing a lot of crutching”, I mean that some of us have spent literally weeks leaning over a crutching cradle, wielding very sharp moving tools while wrestling large and uncooperative animals and getting covered in urine, faeces, mud and the odd maggot, and some of us have been taking photographs. And complaining about the radio station playing in the background. We all have to work to our own individual strengths.

Our “inside agent” sheep stands at the front of the race, to encourage other sheep to walk up into the cradle.

For the crutching fans- it’s a Harrington cradle. Portable- it folds up and can be towed behind a ute. There’s a roll-out awning thing up above the stands.

Now then, single file and proceed in an orderly fashion

There’s always one…

One of these lambs is not like the others…(adorable little cheviot interloper from next door)

You reach in from the side (through canvas flaps), grab a volunteer…

and tip them upside down into the cradle. This is also a handy time to drench them (note drench pack hanging up).

Clip off the mucky wool around the nether regions (and anywhere else that needs it)…

And then tip the freshly groomed customer back onto their feet.

Happy customers!