intro to farm terminology
Reader feedback!
For the first time I’ve gotten a reader question! A very good friend pointed out that she (and others) may not understand some of the farm terminology. When I started writing I intended to explain things, but apparently that pretty much went out the window. So I looked back through the posts and tried to pick out things that may not be common knowledge and I will try to explain them here.
A disclaimer that applies to everything I write is that I am not an expert in anything! I don’t even claim to be good at any of this. I am an enthusiastic student and I am just writing about what we are trying based on the information we have at the time. If anything I write seems questionable, please go to a more trustworthy source.
Ok, on to the terminology!
Handling System - I can’t find a photo of us using our handling system, so I am going to describe how it works when the sheep cooperate and everything goes perfectly. First the sheep are in a pen that can be made smaller as the sheep move through the system. From there they are funneled into a single file alley which I usually call the chute. In the chute we can check them over like look at teeth, eyelids, udders, and testicles. Or we can give them a “drench” medication (by mouth) or vaccinations (injections). If we need to weigh animals that day, we can put a scale in the chute with a gate before and after so we only weigh one sheep at a time, and if we are trimming hooves, we can put our turntable or ‘squeeze’ at the end of the chute. This is a contraption that allows you to turn the animal onto their backs while they are held securely with their hooves easily accessible for trimming. This makes trimming as fast as possible with the least stress for sheep and shepherd. At the end of the system, you can add a sort gate that allows you to funnel animals into different pens.
There are a lot of sheep farmers with small flocks like ours who manage them without a handling system, and all I can say is that those people are way faster, stronger, and tougher than me. We used to move the animals that needed attention into a small pen and then we would catch them and put them in this sheep chair. Once they were in the chair things were relatively easy, and we still use that chair for small ewes and lambs, but having to catch them took a long time so we started looking for something better. We were lucky to find a lot of used equipment used and the rest is a mixture of parts that we bought and built ourselves, so it’s kind of a hodgepodge, but it works!
Images below are Chris trimming hooves using the turntable (left) and our favorite farmhands trimming hooves using the sheep chair (right)
Hay - Firstly hay is a shade of green. This is a crop that is grown to feed livestock. Some farmers plant specific plants which will become hay by being cut, dried, and baled. Other farmers maintain fields of a mixture of plants (grasses and legumes for example) that they can cut or graze year after year. If the plants are grazed, then they are called forage and the field is called a pasture. Hay bales come in a few sizes and shapes. We use ‘small squares’ which are the ones people are most familiar with which usually weigh around 40 pounds, and we use ‘round bales’ which are 4’x4’x5’ and weigh around 500 pounds. We handle these using the skid steer or the tractor by stabbing them through the middle with a hay spear like picking up a marshmallow with a toothpick except if the marshmallow was heavy so you have to pick it up by stabbing it horizontally.
Images below are round hay bale (left) and hay spear (right).
Straw - Straw is yellow or golden. If you go to a farm and they put bales out for you to sit on, it’s probably straw. This is the dried and baled stalks (stems?) of cereal grain plants. Everyone is familiar with cereal grains whether they realize it or not. They are rye, barley, oats, corn, and wheat (cheerios, cap’n crunch, wonder bread). First the grain seeds are harvested, so the straw is a by-product of the grain harvest. I don’t actually think that anyone makes straw out of corn stalks, but I don’t want to take cap’n crunch out and it is a cereal grain so it stays! Straw is used for animal bedding, protecting seedlings, growing mushrooms and probably a lot of things that I don’t know about.
Hoof Trimming - Sheep have cloven hooves, so two little hooves instead of one big one like a horse. The hoof itself grows constantly like a super thick fingernail and as it gets long, it folds under the foot and it can collect dirt and manure and anything else the sheep is walking on. Depending on where the sheep is walking, the hooves need to be trimmed at varying intervals. Rocky Mountain Sheep hooves don’t need to be trimmed because the Rocky Mountains file them down during their daily lives. We usually do our sheep every 6 months or so, but The New Farm is soft and lush so we may need to do more often? We also have been feeding on a concrete pad outside the barn which files them down, so maybe less often? To trim the hooves, first we clean out the hoof and then trim it, using hoof trimmers, like a big nail scissor so it is a flat surface for the sheep to walk on.
Mineral - This is like Centrum Silver - I think I saw a lot of commercials for this while watching soap operas in my teens - for sheep which we feed to make up for the fact that the feed that the sheep eat is grown in deficient soil (so the same reason I take one). We mix our own for two reasons: 1. We are a pasture based / grass-fed operation and most commercially available mineral mixes are made for sheep that eat grains and other types of feed. (I know I have a post mentioning that we use a small amount of grain to lure the ewes into the barn or through the handling system. I don't think that this is enough to change their mineral requirements.) and 2. I can’t find any commercially available mixes in this area! We feed it free choice which means it’s available all the time for them and it’s loose like Lik-M-Aid candy powder. Other farmers feed a certain amount per animal per day mixed in with their feed, but since we graze, we do it this way.
Paddock - For us, this is a subdivided section of a larger fenced pasture. We divide big fields for a few reasons: to separate some animals from others, to keep sheep away from round bales that are stacked outside (now we have more indoor storage, yay!), or to manage which forage the sheep are eating at any time. Imagine the sheep at a Vegas buffet… They will go back to the crab legs over and over again and will never touch the rice pilaf if they have the choice. But the best thing for the health of the pasture (buffet) is for it to be grazed evenly. Even grazing means that the sheep have spread the fertilizer they make evenly, and they have stomped down all the plants evenly and they have aerated the soil evenly with their magic little hooves. We set temporary fences so that some days their only choice is to eat the rice pilaf.
Wether - A wether is a castrated male sheep. We have three around here, Harry, Wooliver, and Bolt. Harry and Wooliver were my favorite sheep - Karen's lambs the year that she died from pasture bloat. We were planning to eventually keep a couple of wethers as companions for our ram, and we decided to keep them to remember her. Bolt was just an accidental, off-season lamb, that was lucky enough to be super cute.
OK! I think that was everything. If there are any other terms or concepts that you would like me to explain, let me know!