Coolidge Life on the Farm: It's that time of year again

As most of our friends and family know, we are in the club lamb raising business. We raise ewes to lamb during certain times of the year depending on when lambs are needed most. We usually lamb in the middle of winter through mid spring. Winter lambs can go to summer fairs and the spring lambs are available for fall fairs. Our fair is in October, so we always make sure we have enough to supply the kids that we are partial to. :)

There is a young girl in our church that has decided that she wants to star showing sheep, and she is going to show 2 different lambs at 2 fairs this year, and because they live in the middle of town, we offered our place to her.

That was one of our tasks on Saturday...get 2 sheep from Chris's parents house to our house & get them vaccinated before the day got too hot. The lambs have already been banded (castrated) so it was time to vaccinate. Not usually a good idea to do it on the same day because when the animal is under stress (banding) the vaccine isn't as effective. However, before we could do any of this, we had to catch them, lift them over the fence because the gate on the pen sucks, drag them over to the truck because the don't walk well yet & then lift them in the truck. One of the lambs is about 110 lbs, the other is about 80 lbs. I'm still sore.

The dog kennel is where the two sheep will be living since the barn isn't ready yet

Chris is cleaning out the feeders and you can see one of the heads of the sheep in the Popper

We vaccinated both sheep with CD&T. The "CD" stands for Clostridium Perfringens type C&D, also known as "Overeating Disease". The "T" stands for Tetanus Toxoid. If CD&T is not kept in the refrigerator, it has to be on ice. Once it warms up, you might as well throw it away. A bottle like this (25 doses) costs about $8.00 at our local feed store.