I Need Farming !

About grazing behavior and genetics.

2014-07-14T13:10:00.001+01:00

It's one of those lovely wet and damp Irish days. These new lambs I bought recently are surely something. I have to say that even being so small and young they graze so much better than their distant inbred cousins, the dreaded Friesians.
Those East Friesians are hopeless. Get one if you want a pet sheep, because they are totally sweet and tame but stay well away from them if you want something to graze that little bit of waste land you have on the farm. Jeez they are hopeless. They won't touch anything that looks different from lush, green, tasty, fat grass.

On the other hand, the F1 crosses Lacaune x Friesians lambs are all over the place, on the ditch, on top of the brambles, inside the gorse, within the reeds, you name it, you'll find a lamb eating it. It's a pleasure to look at them gnawing at pretty much anything belonging to the plant kingdom. Being F1 crosses they also conserve that tameness typical of the "Hopeless Friesian sheep".

Another thing they do differently is looking for shelter. They will pick the best spot, while the Friesians look like someone trying to protect himself from rain with a leaf.

Ah! do I love genetics!

Fitness is what you loose first when you apply artificial genetic selection to animals. The reason is simple, there is no longer any natural selection pressure to keep there those genes badly needed to survive and thrive in nature, where there is no one to protect you from predators, to supply you with plenty of food and to provide you with shelter and clean water.
The more you push selection for a certain trait, the more you lose fitness in the population.
The exact definition of fitness is the capability of an individual to reach sexual maturity and generate fertile progeny. Basically the capability of passing down your genes to following generations, and of course it has a meaning only in wild and feral populations, in fact domesticated animals cannot choose who will reproduce, their owner is the one to decide who is fit to reproduce. Nevertheless they conserve a certain degree of fitness. An extreme example of this is the Bulldog, where fitness=0. Bulldogs are totally incapable to copulate because they have been bred so wrongly. When they manage, they cannot give birth without a cesarean.
It also depends on the criteria you use for selection. Nowadays selection is carried out with a bit more insight compared to the '80s when a single trait was pursued (quantity of milk as opposed to weight at 60 days). So nowadays you find inside genetic indexes also good things like "leg conformation", "udder shape", "feet index" and so on, all traits that have a positive effect on the fitness of the animal.
This also means that you cannot push as much for "milk quantity" anymore, but that's ok, because that little bit extra came at a big cost in terms of health and animal welfare.

So, Friesians have been selected with very little in mind in terms of fitness and very much towards the one goal: lots of milk, because they were traditionally reared in small flocks, housed and well fed. Furthermore there is no tradition of cheese making from sheep cheese in Friesland, so milk is particularly watered down (little solids in it).
Lacaune on the other hand, have been selected in France, with an eye towards fitness and lamb weight. They are reared on marginal land (Roquefort-sur-Soulzon), hence they need to be able to feed on rough material and thrive in Mediterranean semi-arid conditions. Furthermore their milk is traditionally used for cheese making (Roquefort) and is produced in volumes slightly smaller than Friesians' but with more solids, which is what you need if you make cheese. You cannot make cheese with water!

It's nevertheless quite shocking to see the difference with the purebred Friesian lambs I had last year. Long live the Lacaune cross!!

New lambs in.

2014-06-26T20:59:00.001+01:00

Ok, the business course I'm attending says blogging is still cool. I guess anything that can help the business is good.
I got the new lambs on Tuesday, these little rascals are Lacaune/friesian F1 crosses and you can definitely see quite a difference from the tame, sweet friesian lambs I had last year. I spent the night chasing them off the porch, I had to bring inside all my plants and this morning, when they woke me at 5.45, I found them all hidden under the porch.
There is also one beautiful black friesian cross. She is very cute, I couldn't resist when I saw her.The rams are happy to have some company.

Blogger yes, blogger no

2014-06-08T14:09:00.000+01:00

I am thorn. I find it extremely difficult to blog, as you can see I have not posted in aaaages. Since I have started to use google+ it seems to me that blogger is a bit outdated as a platform to share content. But I do understand at the same time that not everyone is on google+ and Rowena posted a comment asking for more updates so here we go.
Things are rolling, spring is in but we still get some very rainy weather, it is Ireland after all. The sheep are all dry and I am not making sheep cheese this summer, on the other hand I am trying to make a blue from cow's milk.
I have a new ram. He is called Big Fecker (as opposed to LF) because he is clearly bigger. His balls are massive! No wonder LF was sterile!
I have been doing some relief milking for a local dairy farmer. It is good work out and I am loosing my cheese handles :)
It is hard work and I cannot possibly understand how these people do it on a daily basis. 5.30 to 11 and then 4pm to 8.30pm. And that's just the nilking!
I am also looking into grants opportunities but it looks like chances are slim.
Concubine had bloat and took a while to sort out and Selvaggia had trouble with her front feet for a while.
I have also started making beer, inspired by the recent visit of a dear friend. The first batch was very good (from a kit), second batch not as good but from grains, so I was quite proud of it anyway. Third batch is bubbling away at present.
I am hoping to get started with the ground works for the cheese lab next month. For now enjoy some pictures. They are quite random, from shearing to beer making. Enjoy.

Winter, peanuts and birds.

2013-12-17T17:02:00.001+00:00

I'm feeling very lazy today. It's cold and although I managed to do a few things this morning, I now feel like just sitting tight and watch the birds on the feeder.
Good news is that the ladies feet are getting finally back to normal after continuous and assiduous managing for the past 3 months.
Another good news is that what seemed to me like a confused and homogeneous mass of coal tits on the bird feeders, it's actually a bit more diverse ensemble.
There is at least a blue tit, a great tit and a goldfinch. They are just a lot more shy than the bloody coal tits and you need to be patient and have the dogs inside to see them. Especially the goldfinch. On the ground there is a Dunnock and a couple of female chaffinches. I've seen the male at times too. Of course, checking on everyone and a bit everywhere, there is the Robin.
I had a couple of Pied wagtails for a long while but I haven't seen them recently.
I also haven't seen the tiny Wren in a while too.
The two magpies are always there when the sheep are around, not to mention the blackbird, Pepe's greatest enemy.

Tupping gone wrong

2013-12-12T23:02:00.001+00:00

Remember how I said that the ram had serviced all the sheep and that I'd put him in again just in case? Well, it turns out Little Fecker is not that good at fucking, or better, he's not that good at getting them pregnant, because surely he's applying himself a lot.
The result is that I might have as little as only two sheep in lamb (Selvaggia and Concubine), but hopefully the third time around he managed the other 3.
My mistake, I left it too late and when I realized that he didn't work it was too late to get another one. If I went to get another ram now I would have lambing in June, which means milking until January. No way Jose!!! Better be barren for a year, especially now that we only have 4, hopefully we'll make treasure of my mistake and won't do it again.
There is a chance that LF is just inexperienced, that the Frisian sheep are a tiny bit too tall (in fact the only 2 that are not on heat again are the shortest ones), or that LF is not mature yet. Truth is that probably he is infertile but I like him so much that I'll try to keep him, possibly as a teaser ram. Way to go Little Fecker!

Bird mass extinction

2013-11-29T13:01:00.000+00:00

Dear friends and 5 readers, I have been finding it difficult to post recently, regardless of the amazing opportunities offered by my newly acquired smart phone (which I got for free from Whizzie).
It's all a big mess in my mind. It's a series of small and big jobs queuing around in my gray matter.
The lane has been fixed but the drainage is still to be sorted out. We did do it actually, we sent all the water in a piece of government owned forestry bordering with us, but it turns out that our neighbour bought it 5 days later and now he's complaining about it and threatening to plug the drain. You think he'd have told us but he didn't. We have a fucking good bunch of neighbours.
So we'll have to do it again.
The ram has serviced all the sheep and I've taken him out now. He's with his Suffolk concubine now.
I'll put him in with the ladies in two weeks again. Just in case.
For the rest, I'm trying to sort out drainage on the upper fields too and tomorrow the digger man is coming in because it's been very dry for two weeks and it's perfect weather to dig.
But the dreadful news of the day is that we had a mass extinction of birds. The fox got 9 chickens and the 3 super cute ducks. Poor Whizzie was heart broken and gave the only 1 survivor to a friend. The evil fox went in and out all night, but what is more shocking is that she climbed a 2 meter net. Guantanamo has been violated. To add more sadness to the bird diversity situation at the farm, I killed a robin. The robin is a lovely little bird. Not just any robin, but the one that I knew and grew accustomed to see around and in the stable. He died in a mouse trap that I thought I had carefully placed in a bird-proof spot. When I saw it my heart shrunk to the size of a walnut. And now I feel even worse. Total miserable. At least we learn from our mistakes.

Electricity

2013-11-12T23:22:00.001+00:00

Electricity is a great thing. I finally got the electric connection for the shed last week. And I love it.
Even though the sheep are all dry now, it's still quite busy around here.
We are trying to sort out drainage in a few parts of the farm, especially around the new lane, in order to defeat the evil forces of the water that want to take our new lane from us.
A gate is also very slowly going up at the entrance of the farm. What color do you think we should paint it? I'd go for red.

Little Fecker has been having lots of fun with the sheep but I have noticed that the first one that was covered is in heat again. Not a good sign little Fecker! You better sort it out if you want a long career!

The female lambs are the funniest things ever. You should have seen them playing today. Jumping like silly goats all over the field.

The love sheep

2013-10-12T19:41:00.001+01:00

I'm almost ashamed of myself but I'm thinking of getting more sheep: http://www.muttonbone.com

humidity in cheese making

2013-10-03T21:11:00.002+01:00

Well well,
humidity is a very important factor in cheese making, mainly in aging, because to get your cheese to age properly within the expected time frame, you need the humidity to fall within a certain range. For example for my pecorino the best is around 85%.
But in the specific case of pecorino, but also other cheeses, humidity is also important in a step that I always took a bit for granted: rind formation. I never had any issues so far and rind for pecorino it's formed after soaking in brine by simply letting the cheese to air dry for one or two days, depending on humidity in the air.
There. In the past couple of weeks we've had so much humidity that I cannot get the rind to form at all. The cheese stays wet and finally after a few days gets covered with slime. Not nice. I do not like slime on my cheese.
It's the awful combination of high precipitation and high temperatures. This will be a challenge next year, I doubt we'll have such a dry summer in the next 30 years :(

Allo! Allo!

2013-09-29T16:42:00.001+01:00

Have you ever watched a tv series from the 80s called Allo! Allo! ? I just finished watching it last night.
Now that the war is over I can get back to the blog!
More than a year down the line and here we are, with 4 lovely sheep, 4 lovely hoggets, 1 lovely ram, lots of lovely cheese and a lot more.
Here's the check list:
Van (thanks to Whizzie, really)
Mobile home (also referred to as jonz-mobile)
Porch, heating, water and generator
Fencing
Netting
Fodder
Bedding
Sheep
Lambing
Milking
Shearing!
Getting Ram
Worming
Cheese making
Cheese aging
P's little wood cabin (thanks to Whizzie, really)
Getting flock number
Get official tags!
Fixing lane
Eat lots of cheese
Get electric connection (started months ago, still not finished because of our neighbour Dike being a Dike)

Next in line on the 'to do' list:
Get rid of last two male lambs
Get concubine for little Fecker
Get proper cheese lab
Get vat
Get milk cooling system
Get licence to sell cheese
Fix motorbike
Sell motorbike
Get more sheep!
Be happy.

Harvest!

2013-09-03T11:09:00.001+01:00

Here is my huge harvest, arranged in classic Italian way. I wonder if it will work here too, with all the humidity we have here, it might not work!

2 gone, 2 to go.

2013-09-02T18:19:00.000+01:00

I just sold two lambs to one of the 5 Irish farmers who have dairy sheep (us included).
It's nice to know that they'll have a few years of "work" in front of them and won't go to the butcher, yet!
Maybe I'll be able to sell the other 2 to one of the other 3 farmers :)
I have been to Italy for almost three weeks and I had a great time. We spent some time in the mountains with Katy and Pietro and also with the Bigoli and my nephews. Grand! I also had lots of delicious food and came back with two salami, one of which is called "the donkey's ball". No balls in there, but very similar shape.
The sheepies were well looked after mostly by P but also by Whizzie in the last few days..
So now back to cheese making, also because two dodgy creatures broke into the old house and stole most of our precious cheese! Sorry Dario, you'll still get some though!

Hiking

2013-08-25T14:54:00.001+01:00

Lazy day

2013-08-09T13:46:00.001+01:00

Painful, is it?

2013-08-02T17:28:00.001+01:00

Lacrime e tormento

I don't think I need to explain how happy I am that this man is finally paying for something.

Too bad he's not going behind bars. QUESTO GRANDISSIMO PORCO!

My new cheese cave

2013-07-21T14:23:00.002+01:00

I finally managed to take a few pictures of my two artificial cheese cave, of the growing lambs and the first real pecorino. I liked it a lot but still need to get some feed back from more volunteers. Back then I still had an issue with the rind formation and mold control in the cave. Since then I have managed to sort it ll out and as you can see the new cheese in the small cave looks just marvellous (at least to me). Ogni scarrafone è bell' a' mamma soja (Even a coackroach looks beautiful to his mum).

On a sadder note, two of the chicks have disappeared :(

The Irish summer!

2013-07-20T12:58:00.004+01:00

Hallo readers! It's been more than 2 weeks now. It's pretty unreal. This is the kind of weather you'd be getting in Italy! A really strange "Irish summer", especially after the super wet and cold summer from last year. We are officially in a drought period now. Not a drop of water for the past 2 weeks and temperatures just below 30 C° in most parts of the country. Hopefully we'll get some rain beginning of next week. My water tank is possibly dry and the grass in the upper fields is very short because the top soil is thin and the lack of water is particularly bad there. At least all this is good for Whizzie's bees, which seem pretty happy and swarming like mad!

I Needed Farming.

2013-07-13T16:41:00.001+01:00

As we say in Italian, "laughing and joking" it has been a year since I moved up here. By "laughing and joking" (ridendo e scherzando), we mean that time passed by real quickly, without us noticing.
Here is a slideshow of what happened during this very intense year, although there are a few things missing, like the electrics in the stable, the lane and drains being dug at the moment, the poly-tunnels we bought and the pigs in their real teen age size. Which is pretty huge. Enjoy! If you are reading through one of those silly ipads without flash support go here: Link

Sheep

2013-07-11T14:02:00.000+01:00

Long post! a bit more technical than usual. After all this blog was supposed to be a small holding blog and not a private diary!

I think the sheep well deserve the first technical post.

The SHEEP.

I always thought that sheep were the most fascinating and versatile domesticated animal on earth. Domestication and then selection of sheep into the vast array of breeds that homo sapiens has produced throughout the millennia is an example to all other domesticated species.

To my knowledge, sheep is the only domesticated mammal that has been selected for three different scopes: meat, milk and wool. The wool aspect in fact is very peculiar. There are examples of mammals domesticated for wool or fine fibre production and meat at the same time, like rabbits and alpacas (although alpaca is not really reared for its meat) or other examples like the bovine, selected for dairy and meat productions. But the sheep is unique in its selection towards three separate attitudes.

The sheep is unique in something else too. It is the only mammal bred for fine fibre production in which selection produced a single coat. Most mammals with a fur have a coat that is composed by an outer coat (hair) and what is mostly referred to as under coat, composed by much finer fibers (dawn). The most prominent example is the Cashmere goat, whose super expensive fiber, produced in the order of a few hundred grams per head, is combed or, more traditionally, picked from the bushes. Cashmere is an under coat.

Basically hair follicles are divided into primary and secondary hair follicles. My PhD supervisor was excellent in his hair biology :) Every primary follicle, producing thick hair, is surrounded by a bunch of tiny, thin, secondary follicles.

But in sheep you basically have a bunch of follicles where you cannot distinguish between primary and secondary anymore, at least not from their diameter, but only from the presence of other anatomical features (sebaceous gland).

Alpacas are going towards that situation too but they are still not there. Or rather, they were probably there before the conquest, or much closer.
Anywhoo, aren’t sheep amazing? :)

So there are sheep selected for meat like the bergamasca

and the suffolk,

but also sheep selected for wool like the merino

and finally sheep selected for dairy production like the Sarda,

the Comisana,

and the Lacaune!

and the East Friesian of course! (and many many others)

Dairy sheep and the use of milk from sheep are surely common in southern Europe and the Mediterranean area, with France, Spain, Italy and Greece, but surely all the Balkans and the middle east too, having plenty of history, breeds and cheese to offer.

In northern Europe dairy breeds are virtually non existent and therefore the traditions that come with them. The only example is in all truth the famous and infamous East Friesian. It is still a mystery to me what such a sheep is doing up there :)

Traditionally they were kept in small flocks with plenty of care and good management to provide milk for the household without the need to have a much larger animal like a cow. This (the intense care) has allowed very intense genetic selection towards a main trait: the quantity of milk. Unfortunately, like it always happens with very intense, mono-directional selection, you end up losing bits and bobs on the way. The result is a sheep that surely will provide you with more milk per head than any other breed on the planet, but has the nutritional needs of a bison and the resistance and toughness of an infant.

I might be exaggerating, but the contrast to other dairy breeds is profound, I can assure you.

Another trait that you usually end up with when selection is so strong is tameness. In fact they are usually very tame animals and this sure is a “pro” for the small holder who is just setting up his/her farm.
So the 4 amazing specimens in my possession are not exactly the kind of breed you’d look for if you want to be sustainable in your farming... But it is the only female dairy genetics that you can source in Ireland at present and that’s the reason I got them.

Another bad reason to have pure blood friesians for us is that we want to process our milk to make cheese and when selection is so intense towards quantity you end up losing in quality. In fact friesian milk has lower solids than the milk from other dairy breeds and it’s pointless to get 100 liters when you could get the same solids (and therefore cheese) with 70, especially considering at what price that extra 30 comes, in terms of extra management, feed and veterinary care...

One positive thing about friesians though, is that if breeding pure friesians is not a good idea, crossing them with other dairy breeds or non dairy breeds gives excellent results:
http://milkingsheep.com/dairy-sheep-breeds/

The F1 crosses, by a phenomenon called the hybrid vigor, will produce above the average of the two parents. This effect is lost with the following generations, but the point is that the genetic gain obtained by crossing with friesians is out of doubt great, gaining usually in quantity without losing in quality.
And this is why I was very excited when I came across a lady in Carlow, just by chance, who had lacaune. She was not selling hoggets or ewes but she’d give me a ram. I wasn’t so sure yet back then but after a few months down the road with the four ladies I was more and more convinced about the choice...
One could object that the Friesians are seemingly delicate because of the poor pastures that I’m using now and sure they could do better on the nicer land, but yet not quite as good as lacaune crosses or pure breed lacaune and at the end of the day it just does not make sense to have friesians if your target is sustainability, it’s like driving a ferrari on a country lane.

Concluding, the plan is to use lacaune rams through the next years and to retain the hoggets, slowly increasing the amount of lacaune blood in the flock, if ever in need to bring back some friesland blood I’d use a friesian ram on a small subset of sheep and possibly a year later use the resulting male F1 offspring to service the rest of the flock. That would inject instantly an average of 25% of friesian blood in the coming offspring.
Another alternative would be to use some Zwartbles genes, but that would not go towards quantity but rather towards an increase in offspring size, without losing much at all on milk production.

Exciting!

Chicks!

2013-06-25T15:43:00.000+01:00

Here are Whizzie's new chicks! The Speckled hen went broody and gave Whizzie this nice present :)

Not much to say really...

2013-06-21T19:29:00.000+01:00

Well, the second pecorino has been cut open and I liked it very much, Tom and Kevin did too and our neighbors are simply crazy about the ricotta. The second time I tried mozzarella it was a lot better but it is really difficult to keep, its shelf life being very short. I make it for fun tho, just for the pizza Saturdays.
The blue looked very interesting when I put it in the cellar, my sheep gorgonzola could be a big surprise.
The milking stand has been redesigned and improved for simpler and easier use. I should post some pics but let's say that now the sheep simply jump on it, the whole milking experience has improved a lot for them and I, and possibly for P when she'll be milking in August. I'm going to enjoy some time off. I surely need it, I look like a relic.
I have been busy for the past 3 or 4 days trying to fix the floor of my mobile home which was about to collapse. Mission accomplished but what a pain in the butt. If I were a bit larger I wouldn't have been able to crawl under it :(
And finally, for something completely different, here are some pics of my friend the hare!

Midges

2013-06-09T15:07:00.002+01:00

Jeez. I forgot about the midges. Because last summer was so humongously shit, we didn't get many midges. But this late blooming spring has brought them back altogether (with the ones from last year too it seems!). As it happens, milking falls right within the time of highest midges activity. This means that my face is covered with bytes. And my wrists. Also part of my arse, my shirt is too short!
This morning I was awaken at 6.30, not by the usual sound of my alarm, but rather by the four sheep bleating VERY LOUDLY right behind my wonderfully sound insulated window of the mobile home. What was wrong with them? Were they just playing a bad prank on me? I could swear I saw one of them smiling devilishly... but no. Their faces, legs and udders had changed colour, they were black with midges!

Anyway, on a different note, cheesemaking goes on. No midges in the cheese yet. I did try one blue and I might try another one in a couple of weeks, but mainly it's still pecorino and ricotta because I feel that the recipe is right. I have a confession to make, I did open the first tiny pecorino I made and I ate it all. It was good, very good. Considering that it was young (below 4 weeks) I was very impressed.
I should post pics but every time I come up to the old house for the cheese I forget my camera and I still don't have one of those fancy smart phones. I promise some more pics. Enjoy the video of the happy ram, sorry about the annoying music in the background.

CHEESE OVERLOAD! THANK GOD FOR THE PIGS!

2013-05-29T18:40:00.000+01:00

Well the workload has increased sensibly since I've started milking the 4 sheep. The lambs and Mr Fecker are almost care-free and I only need to re-fence them with the electric netting every so many days.
I basically milk 8 liters per day and process therefore 16 liters every other day. The mobile home seems to cope with all this cheese making and is still pretty tidy, but surely it's not easy to eat 5 Kg of cheese every other day :) Well, actually most of it keeps piling up in the old house (pecorini to age). Still no proper aging facilities, so I'm using my old modified fridge as a cellar and plastic containers. I'm pretty happy with the cheese/ricotta duo, although the ricotta is the only one we tasted and frankly it is amazing. The pecorini look good but we'll see how they score at the taste bud test.
The ladies have transformed themselves into munching machines and to be honest the amount of grass on the fields at our disposal is not great. The spring is late and temps have been really low for the time of the year but today it's warm and we'll be in the 20s celsius for the next 7 days! :)
I have also tried mozzarella, failed miserably on attempt number one and succeeded satisfactorily the second time around. I would like to try a blue tomorrow.

On the milking side again, surprisingly the best sheepy is Selvaggia, she has the prettiest and better shaped udder among them all and stands still forever while I milk her, one wonders if she stands paralyzed in fear but I believe she's actually very cool, strangely enough.

As the title says, thank god for the piggies, lots of whey and cheese for them from my experiments, if Whizzie didn't have them I'd have a very fat dog by now. 11 liters of whey every other day are just fine for the 2 pigs but it would have been a pain if I had to dispose of it otherwise.
off to milking in a while, more soon.

Sheep shearing and weaning.

2013-05-22T19:02:00.000+01:00

Spring seems to have finally kicked in, although I shouldn't say it too loud. Sure for Italian standards the maximum temperatures are still a joke, but not so much if you go around in a 6 Kg wool jumper and you cant take it off.
It was time to shear the sheep and I was a bit worried about it because I never did it before and surely not with hand clippers! It did go alright though. I did Boss first, she is always very cooperative and it took me 1 hour and a half, would you believe it? The poor thing was about to die of shock. After I released she lied down for an hour or so to recover and I did the same. The other ones went a lot quicker and I managed to get good fleeces out of them, in one piece and clean.
In the meantime I have also weaned all the lambs in two different rounds. The last one went in the day before yesterday. P had prepared these lovely bras for them to help weaning without having to separate them from their mothers (they can't suck), but in the end I ended up separating them for 2 reasons, the first one is that the stable is a lot less busy, the second is that Little Fecker has some company and he's very happy about it (check the picture at the end!).
Finally, I have been making cheese! I have tried of course the Pecorino and ricotta duo, it took me a while but I think I got it straight in the end. The pigs are very happy with the whey. Tonight I'm going to try mozzarella and in a couple of days I'll try a bigger pecorino. So much happening, so little time.

Uploaded with ImageShack.us

Latest pictures

2013-05-13T14:53:00.001+01:00