Spring

It's spring time in the Ozarks, everything is green, the Lord is blessing us with a bunch of rain, and the lambs are doing great on the lush green pastures. Every season at the ranch has it's own rhythm. In spring we finish lambing and hold our annual event, the Ozark Highland Sheep, Fiber, and Craft Festival. This year we had over 1,000 attendees, 25 vendors, a band, two days of sheering, petting zoo, and just a ton of fun things happening. We actually had a production crew that made a short film about the festival - you can watch it below. This event is a lot of fun, and gives people a chance to experience a real working ranch while sampling great food, listening to great music, and hopefully learning something about our regional crafts, the sheep industry, and wool. We have an amazing crew of volunteers (over 20) who help put it together and amazing vendors and sponsors that make the whole thing possible.

But now, with lambing finished (which was great this year), the festival past us, and a lot of wet weather, we get to catch our breath before the next crazy season - summer.

One thing that we are working on this spring is preparing several pastures for a research starting. We are starting the first phase of a new research project, which is being sponsored by the Organic Farming Research Foundation. We are, in collaboration with the OFRF, running a study which will measure the impact of weaning lambs on lespedeza pasture versus our traditional fescue / clover pastures. Specifically it will measure the worm load of groups of lambs raised on the different types of pastures to determine if the parasite load is less when raised on lespedeza. This is a very important study for our industry since it may offer a way to reduce the amount of drenches (medicines) we use to treat the lambs for parasites. Since we are seeing increasing resistance to almost all drenches, internal parasites (in this case the barber pole worm) are a major problem for the industry. Hopefully we will see some really positive results from this research.

And next month, we really begin transitioning into summer, one of the most intense seasons on the farm. Summer is intense because we focus on major infrastructure projects like fencing. These projects require a lot of hard physical labor with an intensity associated with completing them before summer ends and I have to switch my focus to my teaching career. So it's not uncommon to put in eight or ten hours of setting corner posts in concrete, connecting wire, hanging gates, figuring out the best way to set configure the fence to ensure there are no gaps or high points for livestock to escape through. It is hard, but rewarding work where you get the immediate gratification of seeing what you have accomplished at the end of the day in the form of a nice, neat fence row! Of course, we still have the twice a day milking of the dairy sheep, feeding the livestock, and the other many livestock welfare activities that take place every single day. So summer is INTENSE!

So that is our update for this month. I hope your having a blessed month and a fantastic 2025.