water management continues
Happy Monday! I didn’t get any writing or editing or posting done this weekend because the weather was amazing and… this is going to be a shock… we worked outside all weekend! We did go out for an amazing dinner WAY past our bedtime on Saturday to celebrate a dear friend’s birthday. I took a nap earlier in the day to make sure that I didn’t fall asleep in my soup, so I was OK, but then neither of us could sleep afterward because we stuffed ourselves full of food at a time when we are usually sleeping. I’m an early-bird special and I’m not afraid to admit it.
This is going to be a boring post! (excellent marketing as usual) It’s hard to take satisfying photos of large scale drainage projects. To spice it up, maybe I’ll include a description of me and beginner stock dog Tip at our disastrous herding lesson this week.
I did already post about a lot of ditch digging, but that work is continuing! The property is more or less a rectangle and the ground slopes both across and down the rectangle which makes managing the water kind of complicated, and we live in one of the wettest parts of the country, so there is a lot of work to do.
One of the projects to accomplish this is a new driveway! The new driveway is sloped in a way to divert water either to an underground drain, or across the barnyard. Before this work, the driveway was sloped especially so that all of the gravel would wash out into the road when it rained. It probably didn’t start out that way, but that’s how it was when we got here. There was also a shallow channel across the driveway that carried water to the underground drain that I mentioned, but the channel made it hard for the trash man to pick up the dumpster and it also made it bumpy and awkward on the tractor to feed bales or clean bed pack. I also asked them to take off the sod around the milk room door and to put gravel there so we have a nice flat place to change buckets for the tractor or skidsteer. We won’t be able to use this area in winter because it fills with deep snow from the roof, but it will be great the rest of the year. It’s hard for me to change buckets on an uneven surface, but it’s probably fine for better equipment operators.
The fencing install that spurred all of the drainage work, started this morning, so that is really exciting! We are going to be a real farm again soon! (Not to say that using nets isn’t real farming. I just don’t have the time to do a really good job grazing with portable fence.) The sheep are trapped in the barnyard with hay to eat so they are out of the way. I thought they would complain loudly about this development, but they were busy gawping at the fence guys earlier and now they are in the barn for their midday nap.
Another exciting thing is that we bought a livestock trailer! In the past we always borrowed one, but as I’ve mentioned before, we moved away from those wonderful friends/neighbors and we need to be more self sufficient. I have been cruising Facebook marketplace for one, but a couple of weeks ago I showed up at my herding lesson and Barb had a brand new trailer sitting next to her old one! I made her an offer on the old one and brought it home this week!
Which brings me back to my promise of a fun (?) story if you made it through the boring excavation work:
This week was our second herding lesson of the season. In the first lesson of the season, the sheep were cooperative, Tip was amazing, and I only used the wrong directional command 50% of the time. I knew I would pay for such a good session.
This winter I bought a chest harness to hold my phone so I could film some herding activities in case we ever get good at it. I had forgotten about it prior to the first lesson of the season, but I was all set for this lesson and full of unfounded confidence about both herding and technology.
Tip and I were waiting on the field while our teacher and her dog moved the whole flock of sheep into a holding pen. It is like a beautiful symphony when the handler, dog, and sheep are all working together. I thought I got a lot of nice footage of this ‘simple’ farm work.
Then, our teacher Barb selected 3 sheep for us to work. Usually we work these big, quiet, sheep with ears that stand straight up. Bluefaced Leicesters. If I ever wanted a wool breed, I might like them, they just seem to have a really nice temperament. This time though, she got out one Bluefaced Leicester and two Scottish Blackface. The Scotties are BEAUTIFUL and WILD, have horns, and were definitely not impressed with me and my little dog!
This surly little gang was standing in a corner which is a difficult situation for a novice dog and handler, and they totally know it. Tip only likes to go clockwise, kind of like Zoolander. It wasn’t the best direction for this situation and he would move the sheep out of the corner and then I would do something wrong and the sheep would run back into the corner. We repeated this procedure for like 1000 iterations. After about the 300th failure, Tip was getting frustrated and he decided that instead of waiting for me to ruin it, he would run straight at the sheep and ruin it himself! They would scatter like bowling pins and I would yell a string of nonsense like, “Tip NO, away, ah ah ah, AWAY!, NO!, TIIIIIIIP”. It was awful. Then, Barb and her dog took pity on us and moved the sheep away from the corner in an attempt to give Tip some success. By then I was totally frustrated, using the wrong command 95% of the time, and Tip decided he was no longer participating in this gong show. He was mentally worn out, the 1000 failed attempts can take a lot out of a guy, so Barb suggested that maybe taking his muzzle off would put him in a better mood.
It sure did! Without the muzzle, the situation deteriorated further.
A brief discussion about the muzzle: Tip comes from a line of border collies bred to work cattle. A 40 pound dog has to be willing to follow through on threats when moving beef cattle and they can't be afraid to use their teeth. Border Collies have HUGE teeth for a reason, right? The Herding School Dropout (who weighs in at a whopping 29 pounds) is pictured at left.
Isn’t it that the cattle dogs called heelers are called that because they snap or nip at the heels of the cow? I might have made that up. Anyway, tip wears a rubber basket muzzle during training to keep the sheep safe while he learns how to manage them without using his teeth. He can pant and drink with the muzzle on, but I do think that there’s an emotional component too, like he’s being held back to a degree, so both times that I have sent him to get sheep without a muzzle, he has completely lost his mind.
When I sent him to get the sheep without the muzzle, he was happy run directly at them in the most menacing way possible. Then when they scattered them he chose one unlucky sheep to chase and snap at it and run all around 5 or so acres and ignore me entirely. Just when you think that you as a team have moved past this type of behavior, it rears its ugly head again!
At some point, we swapped those irritated sheep for a new group, but I can’t remember if that was before or after the muzzle incident. At some point during the lesson my phone died which was fine, nobody needs to see such a disaster. Tip and I were both completely covered in mud, so I hosed Tip off and we went home to lick our metaphorical wounds.
The next morning when I went to review the footage I discovered that somehow I had only recorded the down times and none of the times when I was actually trying to move sheep, but it doesn’t matter anyway because the property is pretty hilly and the angle of the camera only filmed the foreground. It was 20 minutes of looking at the ground accompanied by my asthmatic panting, and whining about how hard herding is. Fantastic.