Welcome to seeing us at our "Whits End"

Welcome to our farm page where I will be sharing with you are many adventures that sometimes take us to our "Whits end". We have had many experiences over the years on our little farm ranging from the best day of our life to tears and misery as we learn lessons the hard way.

We decided as a family that we wanted to start sharing some of our highs and lows... and sharing our beautiful animals is a fun part too!

Our most recent low was having to sell all of our goats. 5 years ago we bought goats from a local farmer, they were selling all of their herd and we decided that would be a great time for us to get into goat farming. It was a gong show right from the start. None of the nannies were supposed to have been bred.. all of them were and started kidding in December amidst one of our coldest winters. We were not set up for winter kidding and we lost quite a few babies. This was a tragic start to our adventure... which continued to go poorly in the spring time when our herd developed a terrible parasite problem. This started a 3 week protocol of deworming, needles, isolation and tons of extra care. Talk about hitting the ground running!

We learnt a lot that first year and thought that maybe it was nice to get the hard year out of the way at first and then the next years wouldn't seem so bad. This was almost the case... our next years har spurts of good times and then a stretch of loss. We would try to adapt and learn as much as we could, with little help from our local veterinarians as goats (apparently) are not an animal that is taught about in school.

This last year we had a drought that made our bountiful pasture turn into a desolate waste land. This in turn made the goats have to graze really low to the ground, which had them picking up a heavy worm load. I tried my hardest to stay on top of it... we fed them in feeders off the ground, we dewormed, we vaccinated, they have clean water.... but despite all of our efforts we lost more of them than we were comfortable with. This led us to one of our hardest farming decisions... sell the goats. We decided we are definitely not wanting to be done farming so switching to sheep was our best option. I grew up with sheep and I love them! My in laws also have sheep and have had great success with them. Our children were not 100% on board with decision as we have all come to grow and love the goats, however, sometimes thing have to happen out of necessity, not because we want it to happen. So... December 18 the truck came in and loaded up all of our goats and delivered our sheep. It was a sad day on our farm.

Now we have opened a new chapter with our 20 Hampshire ewes. We are excitedly counting down the days until we start lambing March 5th. We will be purchasing another 30 or so ewe's from my in laws in the fall.

Stay tuned to hear of the ups and downs this new adventure holds