Winter Grazing, Part 3
Rams Grazing In Late February
We thanked Will for showing us his pasture and his cows; he also loaned me two books about grazing which I have yet to open. Seeing what he was doing and where he was doing it was enough for me to start, to graze sheep in February, in fields that I'd ignored because they were, or so I thought, brown and dead. I needed no books to get going—seeing was believing—if he could do it, I would try it. And if the ewes needed more nutrition, I could always feed them.
On the way back to the sheep, Dominique and I agreed that we would watch their body condition; we would keep feeding them grain but the bales that were left in the hay feeders, once gone, would stay gone as long as the sheep were not hungry. Don't doubt, hungry sheep will tell you when they're hungry—they "baa" at you, they become incredulous, they imply, "how could you treat us like this?" then look away from you to melodramatically face their suffering alone letting you blame yourself for your lapse—they know who their servants are; they're not afraid to speak up, a hundred odd voices in a cacophonic chorus bellowing, "Feed us." They're good and the fat ones are better at it.
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The blackfaced ram pictured above; one of two Oxford rams I have along with two Shropshire, four Corriedale, one Tunis and one Ile de France rams; is a sire of the crossbred lamb I sell every Saturday of the year from my farm stand at the Union Square Greenmarket in New York City and online from the Lamb Store.
All breeding ewes on the farm are purebred Saxon Merino sheep.
It's not that I have two different flocks, one for lamb and one for wool, I have one flock of Saxon Merino ewes and I choose how I want to breed them from year to year based on the market. I select which, and how many, Saxon Merino ewes will be bred to the larger framed rams and which will be bred to the finer wooled purebred Saxon Merino rams. The amount of Saxon Merino wool I shear every year is in part due to the breeding selections I make. The crossbred lambs are viable and healthy due to the hetrosis from crossing different breeds and the purebred Saxon Merino lambs have an ultrafine wool (17.4 microns) which is soft and like no other wool