MOVING ON TO GREENER PASTURES

Yesterday we enjoyed moving our goats and sheep to different pastures.

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Having @grandpa-pepper in town gives us another set of hands, so it makes jobs like this easier. Not all of the animals will go where you want them to go, so we've got to help them a lot of the time. Why are we moving them?

I HAVE MY REASONS

Moving our sheep and goats is a beneficial task. We are aggressively grazing them right now, which means that we are allowing them to eat an area down really low prior to moving them. This helps us as we seed the pasture. Many of the plants that we desire to have in our pastures can have a hard time competing with the existing grass. By allowing the animals to graze it down, it doesn't kill the existing grasses, but it does allow the Sainfoin, Birdsfoot Trefoil, and other seeds to take root and grow.

Now that they've finished the areas that they were in, it's time to move them to new pastures. Once we get established, we hope to constantly provide new pasture for these animals. Grazing near the soil means grazing near their own manure, which is often when parasites are most likely to occur. When they can graze on taller grasses, it is healthier for them too. With a good rotation of pastures, we hope to be able to provide the optimum dining experience for our animals.

For our move, the friendlier animals were just allowed to walk from one pasture to the other. Others, though, had to be caught and then led on a leash. Hopefully we will be able to build relationships with the animals that allow us to move them with far less effort in the future, and fresh green pasture can be a helpful encouragement!

As usual, @grandpa-pepper was most helpful! He picked up our female Angora Goat and carried her to her new home. She was not exactly being cooperative before that.

Even the smaller @little-peppers get to help out too. Here Pinkie-Pepper leads one of our Shetland/Finn sheep while Sweet-Pepper works the gate. I love having children around who can help, and who are also willing to help!

The goats started off in the woods once inside their new pen. They are more browsers than grazers, so they like to eat a variety of other things besides the grass. Having done an excellent in their previous pen, I'm sure they'll do a great job taming this one.

Once the goats and our Shetland/Finn sheep were moved, it was time to move the Jacob's Sheep. We have a lot of fencing to still put in on the perimeter, so these new pastures will give us some time while we work on that. Check out that ewe jumping behind Sweet-Pepper in the photo above!

The Jacob's Sheep were much easier to move with the enticement of fresh green grass. This flock is a great lawn mowing team and we really enjoy having them on our homestead. Now we will just have to figure out how many is a reasonable number to have.

Check that out! As soon as they made it through the gate they had their heads down, ready for lunch! Thankfully their portion of this job was easy, as opposed to those goats. Now I've got to get to work on the rest of that fencing!

As always, I'm @papa-pepper and here's the proof:

proof-of-greener-pastures

Until next time…

GIF provided by @anzirpasai

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