When the pasture stands empty

Plan on a two year time frame if you're thinking about raising beef.  Ideally, you buy in the Spring and send to market just before the third Winter.  Beef always does better in pairs, so it is suggested that at least two are purchased at a time.  Keep track of all your costs:  purchase price, hay, grain and butcher fees.  If the beef is still 'on the bucket' when you buy them, you'll need to figure in the cost of milk replacer as well.  Also consider running barbed wire atop your fences because beef will push and test all boundaries.  If done efficiently, you can raise two beeves for two years and, in selling off one, recoup your overhead costs.  Homegrown beef is not only economical but also produces a quality product.

For two years you'll carry buckets, fork hay, rotate pastures and muck out paddocks. Expect to be slobbered on, pushed around, bellered at and stepped on.  Two years of daily attention can be a daunting commitment, but when the time is up and the pasture stands empty, your heart will ache for it.

Rusty

Two years ago Hank and I brought home Rusty and Bumper.  They were just a few months old so twice a day I mixed buckets of warm milk in the house and carried them out to the barn.  They pushed their heads down into those buckets and came out still suckling on their own tongues.  Those first few months, whenever they heard my voice or the rattling of plastic buckets, they'd get excited.  My red Carhartt jacket was quickly shellacked with slobber.

That first Winter we pastured Rusty and Bumper with the ewes until we noticed they had ringworm.  Highly contagious, we immediately separated them from the girls.  Because of the lanolin in their wool, sheep don't typically contract ringworm, and we'd never had to deal with this before.  After giving the cows a healthy deworming, I snapped on rubber gloves every day and smeared anti-fungal cream on the sores around their eyes. When the weather warmed up, the ringworm seemed to be gone so I headed into the barn and bleached down every surface I could find.  Thank God I never caught it!

The first Summer it was evident that Rusty and Bumper would eat the ewes out of house and home so we moved them over to the rams' pasture.  And while we watched that pasture quickly dwindle, Hank ran some temporary fencing around the barnyard so we could run them on grass that we would have otherwise mowed.  This worked well until one night when they finagled their way into the chicken coop.  The door, which swings inward, shut behind them and they couldn't get out.  They spent the night gorging themselves on chicken feed.  The next morning I opened the door to a trampled, manure-covered mess and two very thirsty cows.

Out of the temporary barnyard and back in with the rams they went, while Hank planned out new, more cow-friendly pastures.  We decided that we'd extend both the rams and ewes pastures, adding another two acres.  This required several gates to not only effectively rotate the animals but also to keep the ewes, rams and cows separate as needed.  Before even half of the posts were pounded, Rusty and Bumper quietly pushed down a section of woven wire one day and tip-toed out to freedom.  You can imagine my surprise when I looked up from my sewing project to see Bumper staring in the dining room window.  The new pasture project was allocated to the top of the Priority List.

Finally settled in their new, cow-only enclosure modeled after Fort Knox, Rusty and Bumper were really filling out.  After the drought conditions in the Midwest and our subsequently small hay crop, we knew we wouldn't make it through the winter and started looking for round bales to feed the boys that second Winter.  After having just spent the extra monies on fencing and gates (have you priced out metal posts lately?), we were less than pleased at this new feed expense.  Taking into consideration the costs and the extra work required for feeding and cleaning up, I was really starting to appreciate the simplicity of raising sheep.

We finally made it through that second Winter which brings us to this past Summer.  The new pastures and gates worked beautifully.  We ran hoses for water and started feeding corn to finish them off. Rusty and Bumper did push down a few more sections of woven wire, trying to get into the rams' pasture and the chicken run.  And just about the time they were scheduled for pick-up, we had all the fence lines re-stretched and topped with barbed wire. 

Pick-up...just yesterday the butcher backed his trailer up to the gate.  With a pan of corn, I stood inside the trailer, talking sweetly to coax Rusty and Bumper in with me.  I felt like such a Benedict Arnold.  There were three other beefs in the truck.  Two had diarrhea and one had snot all over his nose.  What do these farmers do to their animals?  I felt like a protective mother who didn't want her children associating with the other "less than desirable" kids. They had only ever been in wide, open spaces and hesitated at the small enclosure.  Once loaded, I climbed on the running board and reached inside to scratch their chins.  It broke my heart to know that for the last 24 hours of their life, my boys would be scared and stressed in unfamiliar surroundings.  How I wish I had the strength to finish things at home.

I've always thought of myself as a pretty stoic person.  Hank and I have had animals of one species or another on our farm for the past 15 years.  We've had goslings die from exposure and laying hens die from old age.  We butcher our own broilers, turkeys and ducks.  We send lambs off to market almost every year.  Heck, I did a little dance when the pigs went off to butcher!  We have had to put down sick ewes and bury them in our pasture.  And there are more cats buried in that same pasture than I can even name.  Typically I can take it all in stride.  But somehow not this time.  No matter how many jokes I cracked about them being tasty and for all their hardwork and mischief, Rusty and Bumper really got to me.  But this is part of it too, I know.  God made a Farmer to delight in the sunny days and to shoulder the dark ones.  And in the dreary days of Fall, when the pasture stands empty, it quietly holds the promise of the coming Spring, if only you can see it.