Unnatural

No matter how hard we try, the reality of any farm is that it is an “unnatural” system. Through breeding, forage selection, grazing management, fencing, reproduction and growth goals, necessary survival rates, and a whole host of other human manipulations the gap between natural animals and unnatural farm animals is quite large.

Yesterday I wrote about saving a lamb who was unable to get a drink from its mother. The reason it was unable to get a drink was because the ewe makes so much milk that her udder was so full that it was too low to the ground, the teats were pointing straight down, and the teats were so engorged that they were too fat and too firm for the lamb to get his mouth comfortably around on the rare occasion that he was able to find the end of a teat. Had I not been there to intervene, it is likely that the lamb would have starved, although it is possible that he might have worked it out.

It seems, therefore, that the farmer was the solution, the savior. If, however, we look a step or two back, we see that the farmer was in fact the source of the trouble. Production minded farmers are constantly breeding their sheep up to produce more milk, while at the same time they are generally also breeding their sheep up to be more prolific, shooting for an average lambing rate of about 200% (two lambs per ewe), which would require a significant percentage of ewes to have triplets, while a good number will also have singles. The more milk, the more lambs that can be fed. The more milk, the faster and bigger the lambs will grow. The goal is to strike a balance between high milk production, high prolificacy, and high growth rates and potential. Within this balance, however, much will be out of balance, and problems will arise. Milky ewes will make too much milk, requiring an intervention. Prolific ewes will have too many lambs, requiring an intervention (bottle feeding). Etc. In other words, in creating unnatural critters that live in unnatural environments, we create problems for ourselves.

Nature kills its problems and nothing notices. On an unnatural farm, every death constitutes a substantial financial loss. It takes anywhere from two to five (depending on one’s per lamb profit) lambs from other ewes to pay the cost of a single ewe that doesn’t have or loses her lamb or lambs in any given year. In nature, a sick animal wanders away and dies, and nothing notices but the buzzards and flies. On an unnatural farm, there is a mad scramble to keep animals alive, if only to kill them later.

Any horse person has heard the non-horse person argument about bringing the horses in out of the rain or the cold, “It’s a horse! Just leave it outside.” The idea is that horses are big natural critters with thick fur coats that could get along just fine outside. The reality is, however, that domesticated horses are not natural critters and farms are not natural places. First, many performance horse breeds, because they have been bred up to perform at the levels they do, have high energy needs and cannot spare very much energy for warmth. Second, farm landscapes often do not permit shelter from the wind or rain or snow. On my farm, our pastures are wide open and are pitched directly into the prevailing wind, which blows pretty steadily all winter long at ten to twenty miles per hour. Also, our pastures are fenced. The movement of the horses is unnaturally limited. A natural horse in a natural environment in dangerous weather would walk until it found a sheltered spot. And, third, natural horses in natural environments that don’t find shelter in dangerous weather die. Just because the species deer still exists in spring doesn’t mean that a substantial number, and perhaps even a substantial percentage in a particularly hard winter, didn’t die. They did die. The goal on an unnatural farm is zero percent death loss due to environmental conditions, an unnatural goal.

If you ask them, you will find that most pasture-based farmers attempt to recreate as much as possible natural (environmental) conditions for their animals. They fall, however, far far short. Nature is inimical to farming. The true goal of every farmer is at the very least to mitigate nature; it is most often, even on the pasture based farm of a natural minded farmer, to overcome nature, to dominate nature, to control nature. Nature is a false aspiration. I am always at every instant on the farm at odds with it, even when I feel closest to it.

 

The Old Girl Was Just Teasin’

So, the Old Girl still hasn’t had her lambs. She is my first old ewe, so I am convinced that old ewes just have loose ligaments, which would make sense, given how many times they have tightened and loosened over the years. Now I am in a conundrum. She is going to give birth, that is certain. The problem is that now I have no idea when that might happen. She and her companion have been locked up in the shelter for about a week. They don’t seem to mind, but I’m sure they would prefer to be out with the rest of the flock. I can either leave them locked up or let them out. If I let them out, she will almost certainly have her lamb/s outside, unless I happen to see her just as she is about to go into labor and can get her in the shelter. Nighttime low temperatures for the next few days are going to be well below freezing. I don’t think it is the best idea to have a lamb/s born on the frozen ground in those temperatures. So, I guess I will keep her and her companion locked up.

By the way, I have been talking about loose ligaments, but I haven’t explained what that means. I apologize. There are ligaments on either side of the tail bone that are attached to the pelvis. Ordinarily, the ligaments are tight or hard. As birth approaches, the ligaments loosen or soften, in order to facilitate the alignment of the birth canal to ease the delivery of the lambs. A shepherd with a good eye can see the visible signs when the back end of the ewe is beginning to shift to delivery position, rather than needing to actually grab a hold of the ligaments. The visible signs are pretty obvious, but it takes training to be able to see them.

It took me about three years before I could see horses well enough to tell similarly colored, patterned, and sized horses apart, and after five years of watching them walk, I can still only discern that a horse is off when it is practically lame. Jen on the other hand can see the faintest hint of an off-stride from two hundred yards away and can recognize a horse she knew for only two months and hasn’t seen in five years on a farm where she wasn’t expecting to see it. That is the difference between a lifetime’s worth and a few years’ worth of training and practice.

You may have noticed that I make a distinction between “watching” (the forsest) and “looking at” (the trees) the animals. Watching takes place through the farmer’s third eye and creates a sort of mystical visual feeling that things are as they should be or something in the flock or herd is wrong. Quality watching can grant the farmer a modicum of prescience and should therefore be a part of every farmer’s daily routine. Looking, which of course should also be part of the daily routine, is an active effort to visually inspect the animals, and takes place in ordinary stereoscopic vision. It is looking that teaches the farmer to pick up on those important subtle differences and changes like the ewe’s hollow or the horse’s stride. I am a confident watcher. However, I do not see the details as well as I should when I look. I have a lot of work to do on my looking, but that is no surprise as it is a straightforward, practical skill that requires practice and training.

 

Cold and Animals

About mid-afternoon yesterday our first real cold of the season swept in from the North on thirty mile an hour winds, with much stronger gusts. It was 30° about noon, and by dark it was about 10°. Right now it is 6°, but thankfully the wind has died down.

About January these temperatures will be pretty normal, but at the moment, they are extraordinary, and they require some thoughtfulness regarding the animals. Winter coats are not fully in, and the animals, like their farmer, are not yet acclimated to frigid temperatures. It is actually these blasts of frigid air in the early winter that help fully develop winter coats. The initial trigger to start growing winter coats is the decreasing daylight. However, the degree to which the coat actually comes in is controlled by temperature, which is why if you blanket a horse it doesn’t grow a winter coat.

As the wind swept in yesterday, I kept an eye on the horses out in the pastures and I brought a small open front shed over to the pigs at my neighbors’ place. I didn’t worry about the chickens, goats, or sheep, who are already well-protected. Over the past week or so I have been feeling that the pigs’ run-in shed is not quite well protected enough for them, especially when the little ones come at the end of December. The run-in shed is about ten feet wide and twenty feet long, and about six and a half or seven feet high. The shed is six feet wide, about four feet deep, and a little over five feet high, so when I slid it into the run-in with the side flush against one wall, the open side facing in, and about a third of the way into the run-in, it basically made a three-quarters wall, which almost completely eliminated wind penetration into the run-in without compromising air flow. Later, I saw that the pigs were happy with the shed being there because they were laying right in front of it. To get the shed over there I roped it to the tractor bucket. It was a chilly trip on the tractor.

On my way back from placing the shed, I looked out at the horses as I drove past the pastures. They were still contentedly grazing with their asses pointed into the wind, so I didn’t worry about them. A couple of hours later, they were all standing still with their asses into the wind and their heads hung down in front of their chests to block the wind flowing over it, which meant it was time to bring them in, not because leaving them out for a couple more hours until dusk when I normally bring them in would put them at any risk, but rather because there just is no point in leaving them out there when it has gotten cold, and more importantly, windy enough for them to adopt what is basically a survival posture. They would prefer to be in their stalls munching on hay or taking a nap.

Regardless of their preference, a horse is a pretty hardy critter. With their asses pointed into the wind, they present a very small profile, which dramatically cuts down on heat loss, and their asses are the thickest, densest parts of their body, so they lose the least heat to wind through their rear end. When they hang their heads in front of their chests, there is almost no wind flowing over them, which greatly reduces heat loss from their most vulnerable area. On top of the value of this physical posture to minimize heat loss, horses have a very high volume to surface area ratio because they are so large, which means that it is very difficult for the cold to penetrate deeply into the horse because as the cold works its way into the horse, the 100° internal temperature of the horse beats the cold back. Then there is the heating value of the horse’s digestion system. The primary digestion of a horse (and the ruminants) is by fermentation as opposed to by chemical reaction as in humans (and pigs). One of the by-products of fermentation is heat, and that heat is generated deep inside the horse. Ordinarily, the heat from digestion needs to be shed to cool the horse. In the cold, this heat serves as an internal furnace, blasting away all but the coldest temperatures. Finally, the horse’s winter coat, especially the thick downy layer near the skin, has an extremely high insulating value. As if all of the above were not enough, in wicked cold temperatures, the blood flow to the lower parts of the legs, which are very thin and poorly insulated, is reduced, minimizing heat loss even further.

So, given the above, why do we bring the horses in to get them out of the cold? Because of the wind. Just as water will eventually bore through rock, wind will eventually steal enough heat from a horse to put it at risk. Our pastures are totally exposed. There is not a single sqaure foot of wind break. An exposed pasture where the wind is blowing at thirty miles an hour, the ambient temperature is 6°,  and the wind chill about -10° is no place for a horse. It is no place for any animal.

In the wild animals protect themselves in conditions such as the above by seeking shelter in a stand of trees, behind a thicket, or in a hollow. Most of those that don’t do so suffer miserably, and some of them die from exposure.