Views from a Shepherdess

 By Joyce Weaver

 As corn and soybean farmers are winding down their harvest in the Midwest here in late October, the shepherdess on this farm is doing much needed activities that had been previously put on hold — while attending to several lambing mama sheep.

The rams have been put in with the flock and have been doing their thing to provide lambs for next season. 

This makes a good opportunity to clean out the sheep barns with the small 26 hp tractor. It has to be small enough to pass under the 7-8 ft tall barn doors where the sheep enter. The days of using a pitchfork are long gone for me. Thank goodness for modern machines that do much of the heavy work for us! With so much heavy physical work required to make food on farms I can understand why many people migrated to the cities in previous generations when they didn’t have the machines we have today. But I certainly wouldn’t want to live in a city now. At least country folk can raise a lot of their own food, generate heat by wood, solar, wind or other means not available to city dwelling folks. Most of us also don’t realize how fortunate we are to be able to have a well and get our own clean water to drink and give to our livestock. 

After cleaning out the barn with the small tractor I piled each scoopful outside in the sheep lot. Now it is time to get the other tractor out and start spreading the “fertilizer” on the hayfield. My hayfield hasn’t seen fertilizer in 20 years so this job is way overdue. I waited until after I had taken the last cutting of hay off so the turf would be short and the “fertilizer” could be more readily absorbed into the ground over the winter snowy months. I used two tractors — one connected to the manure spreader and the second to scoop it up with the loader and dump it into the spreader. I’m sure when this old International 200 spreader was manufactured in the 1940s-1950s the person using it had to pitchfork the material in by hand to load it. Shudder the thought. 

Also on the food front, I have been harvesting butternut squash in abundance. I bought one butternut squash from a grocery store in February, removed the seeds before cooking, and planted the seeds this spring in the residue of some round hay bales I had fed the goats this past winter. At first we didn’t have much rain and the plants didn’t do much. Then it rained a few times and that was all it needed. I had squash plants spreading out all over the place — even extending into the driveway. When I started harvesting them a few weeks ago I counted over 200 squash. Fortunately this type of winter squash stores well. They are a very nutritious food and are loaded with vitamins and minerals. I later found some others I had planted which were covered with the lawn grass and hidden from view. These squash were HUGE and as big as pumpkins! I plan to bake those, put them in the freezer in freezer bags and have a ready source for winter soups, cookie making and other uses. And of course, the sheep love them too. Nothing goes to waste. So the physical activities one does on a farm — which some people may call work — are well worth the effort. You may email me at lambjoyw@gmail.com