What Ewe Don’t Know

Do we ever get tired of swapping “ewe” for “you”?  The answer is no, it’s too easy of a joke.  Laugh with me.  I’ve been saying that phrase the title is referencing a lot - you don’t know what you don’t know.  You can’t know how much you don’t know!  Farming is forging ahead despite a whole bunch of unknowns – the weather, markets, uninformed and inconsistent consumer demands.  Currently we’re working on some big changes to our business that wade deep into the waters of personal unknowns and it had begun to challenge my upper limit for unpredictability.  But that doesn’t defer the usual day-to-day unknowns.  Like the lamb I euthanized today.  I made that decision because I didn’t know what was wrong with it which means I couldn’t fix it.  I did know its pain was steadily increasing and my tolerance for that is finite.  Over the course of its first 24 hours out of the jug I watched it slowly deteriorate.  Most natural forces that want to kill young lambs act fast but this was a dull lethargy and minor signs of discomfort.  Once I was convinced something was definitely taking this lamb downhill, I scooped it up, brought it inside the house, and went to work.

            All the time I’m fussing over the lamb, going through the motions to check body temp, warm it, hydrate it, feed it, I’m thinking I may not do this next year.  We’re working towards a transition to a more hands off pasture lambing system.  If not next year then soon after.  Jug lambing in winter has been the way we’ve always done it and what the shepherds we’ve always looked up to have done.  I won’t say we’re experts but we have become pretty damn good at lambing this way.  Colin and I have developed and memorized our own SOPs to deal with a myriad of diseases supplemented by a whole bookcase of texts with tabs on the most well-worn pages.  Lambing season, at this point, is an uncomplicated alternating of duties checking the barn but not being tied down to it.  We can accurately spot a ewe a whole day out from lambing and walk the tightrope confidently that is assisting as needed without going in too early or late.  Our lamb and ewe mortality is phenomenally low and we’re not losing lots of sleep either.  It’s just practice.  Lamb out enough ewes, see enough of what can go wrong, and learn from your mistakes.  But with pasture lambing…we’re starting over.  We’ll still be equipped with the knowledge to save most any lamb and we’ll be choosing to use less of it.  There’ll be new lessons around periparturient nutrition, drift pasture moves, and how to prepare for bad weather.  The price for those lessons will be lambs lost, no way around it.  Management will be more about preparation than intervention and treatment with more focus on setting ewes up for success in a time of year that lambs have a fair chance at surviving.  Our whole twelve-month schedule with the flock would shift!  Throughout lambing this year, in the back of my mind I’m wondering who’s going to make the cut.  Because we don’t know which ewes are up for that kind of transition and which ones we might be asking too much of.  I don’t know all the hurdles that’ll pop up for them or me.

            And the more I talk about this plan to change lambing systems and all the complimentary management strategies that will evolve to match, the more push back I run into.  Pasture lambing?!  Without jugs?  Without barns!  Shock!  Horror!  Plenty of good, respectable shepherds who have simply never heard of such a thing.  But look to the major sheep farming leaders across the globe and you’ll find pasture lambing is not so unusual after all.  Actually, raising sheep almost entirely without barns is probably the norm around the world (this is my educated guess – I don’t have solid numbers to prove it).  Colin and I have done a ton, and I mean a ton, of research on different lambing systems and my favorite are the primary sources producing the same sort of shock towards our labor-intensive indoor lambing as my local peers have to this notion of pasture lambing.  You might think our plan is nuts but talk to anyone in Wales or New Zealand and they think we’re all ridiculous for stuffing every single ewe into a jug, in a barn.  It’s right here in this middle ground between first-hand experience and learning anew that I dug in, not to my comfort zone but to the reaction we all seem to have towards our specific unknowns.  What we do and say to the things outside of our comfort zone.  When we think I can’t, you can’t, that’s impossible do we consider how much we don’t know?  Do we put any stock into the limitations of our knowledge, get our egos past number of years doing the same thing or amount of sheep lambed out the same way?  How many different kinds of people and places have we learned from?  I recommend to all my new-to-sheep shearing clients that they find a local mentor who understands the nuance of the area’s climate, markets, and resources.  That’s a place to start but now I’m thinking what if we kept adding on?  What if the next step was to learn more from those across the state, then the country, then other countries?    

Now, I’m not trying to pretend Vermont’s climate and markets are the same as in New Zealand or China or Texas but I can tell you Colin and I did not invent this strategy of pasture lambing and we wouldn’t even be the first in the Northeast to adopt it.  It’s uncommon, sure, but is that perhaps because we’ve been a little too insulated around here?  I’m also not about to suggest we do everything the way shepherds in Ireland or Australia do it.  The point I’ve found myself hung up on is the source of the push back we’ve received when sharing something new, an unknown, with others.  I’m really not the type to live by a bunch of common motivational quotes but I’ve got another living in my head.  Everything you’ve ever wanted is on the other side of fear.  Raising sheep exactly like your neighbors have for years and years is comfortable.  The worst part about my sick lamb today wasn’t having to end its life.  It was the discomfort I felt in the uncertainty that I was making the right call to end its life.  So rarely can I not diagnose a sick lamb!  What if I kill it only to discover obvious signs pointing to a curable condition that I could have doctored it through?  After a half day of all my best tricks I found myself hunched over a faded purple bath towel in the middle of our manure pile with a rifle and my necropsy knife.  I opened up the deceased lamb and urged the universe to help me find an answer.

            Another catchy little quote I was recently sent from a family member (we are all Ted Lasso fans, hope you are too), “Be curious, not judgmental.”  I don’t feel like every person to question our lambing plans has been judgmental, but curiosity doesn’t seem all that common.  Asking questions with a truly open mind can force you to see past the boundaries of your comfort zone.  A potentially scary place to look.  Getting to the point we’re at now, staring down some drastic changes ahead, I’ve had to do as much talking about the past as the future.  What have I seen?  All the unknowns we’ve already overcome!  There’s no way to accurately predict every single challenge that comes with big change but finding this common theme in discomfort with the unknown, I’ve found excitement overtaking my worry.  It’s no fun doing the same exact thing for forever and we’re both ready to mix it up.  We’ve already been curious, that’s what got us even considering change in the first place.  Now I’m excited to see what’s on the other side of those fears.

My sick lamb - there was no saving it.  It might sound odd to describe relief over a dead animal’s dissected remains.  But that’s what I felt when I carefully opened its distended intestines to find a ridiculous amount of wool.  This gets filed under one of those “you never would have guessed” diagnoses.  I took pictures to show Colin and the vet.  Colin (between shearing jobs) immediately called me up and we discussed whether there was anything we could have done to prevent or cure it.  Maybe there was but I’m comfortable with the assumption that by the time I knew something was wrong, there was no saving it.  Just a fluke, nature does that.  I made a decision despite my uncertainty and it turned out to be the right one.  Either way I learned from it.