Daily Operations and Capital Improvements

The County Fair is this week and as I’ve been writing, The Lowe Farm has an exhibit about heritage breed livestock set up along with a table full of sheep-y goodies like raw wool, roving, and yarn. We’ve also added some shepherd tools like an ear tagger, tail bander, and lamb scale. The animals are always popular.

Do you remember Annabelle? I'm sure you've seen her on here before.

So is the hand sanitizer.

These are not our pigs...but I've been thinking...

I’m telling you, people are addicted to that stuff. When they see it on the table, they take a squirt just because they’re walking by. As if some strange sheep bacteria blew over and attached to their hand as they walked past.

We went through several bottles.

We get a lot of questions about how we “manage to do it all” and all the work involved. It is a lot of work and it’s wonderful that people appreciate it. But it brings up interesting questions about our daily life. On the farm there’s daily operations (feeding, watering, observation), there’s weekly and monthly operations (cleaning or maintaining shelters and equipment, vaccinations, deworming, field rotations, etc.); and there’s seasonal operations (breeding, lambing, shearing).

And then there’s Mr. Fix-It’s operations. In government work, we call his operations Capital Improvements. In farm-work I call that “not my area of expertise.” Things like build fences, chicken coops and pens, putting up hay shelters, and most recently deconstructing a “gravity cart” into our new and improved corn buggy.

Parts...

If you’re wondering what a gravity cart is, well notice that preceding sentence…”not my area of expertise.” That really boils down to, “I don’t really know and I don’t really worry about it.” I’m blessed to be able to tell Mr. Fix-It what I think we need and if he agrees, he knows how to make it happen.

...And Labor.

We feed whole corn as an energy supplement over the winter in the last 2-4 weeks of gestation before lambing to maintain ewe health and I needed something to keep it in so we could buy it from local farmers instead of buy bags from Ohio at the local feed store. So Mr. Fix-It went to a local auction and brought me back our future “corn buggy.” And just for the record, besides supporting local farmers, the price difference between direct from the farmer or from the feed store is literally almost 50%.

This inside will look beautiful full of sweet golden, local grown corn kernels.

So check back soon to see how we’re progressing. I can’t wait for a picture of bright yellow corn spilling into our newest capital improvement project!