The Bookman Cometh

I received a couple books today that I had ordered from Amazon, Natural Sheep Care by Pat Coleby and The Complete Herbal Handbook for Farm and Stable by Juliette de Bairacli Levy. The former is the updated American version of Healthy Sheep Naturally which I have written about on this blog before. The latter is a book that I have intended to buy for a long time and finally got around to it.

On the subject of herbs for livestock, we have begun adding garlic powder to the dried seaweed meal and salt that we offer our sheep free choice. Garlic is a general herb for good health, a strong immune system and fighter of internal and external parasites. We finally had to worm our lambs and two of our five ewes this week after a period of very hot and humid weather contributed to the population explosion of the dreaded barber pole worm, Haemonchus Contortus. Barber pole worms cause anemia and, in severe infections, death. It is easy to check sheep for anemia - simply pull down their lower eyelids and observe the color of the membrane there. Bright red is best (no anemia) and pure white means the sheep is near death from loss of blood. I consider it quite an accomplishment to have made it to August without having to worm and I credit the mineral supplementation, especially copper sulfate, and good pasture rotation and grazing practices. My hope is that the addition of garlic, and perhaps wormwood during hot and humid weather, along with adding cows to our pasture will enable us to eliminate worming altogether from our farm in the future.

On the subject of cows - we want some. We like beef and we also think that having cattle and sheep on the same pasture would help to combat the parasite problem since cows and sheep don't suffer from the same worms. Unfortunately, it's not as simple as just going to a livestock auction and bringing home some feeder calves. Oh, it would be that simple if we didn't care about the way the calves were raised prior and didn't care about whether the genetics of the calves was appropriate to grass feeding. But we do care about those things so that brings us to two possibilities: 1) We buy cows or heifers of known genetic backgrounds and breed them, or 2) we find a source for feeder claves from a herd of cattle and a farmer that we trust.

Number 1 above is undesirable because our farm is quite small and we really don't have room for brood cows and calves and yearlings. Plus we would have to use artificial insemination because there's no possible way we could find room for a bull. Number 2 above would be fantastic but also darn near impossible. It seems that most people in this area who raise grass fed cattle are finishing them and selling them as beef rather than as feeder cattle. I don't blame them since that's where the money is but I would be willing to pay a premium over auction prices for weaned calves of known genetic background from an organic (not necessarily certified) herd raised on forage only.