A few years ago, having learned from my frequent Gator rides, I decided, and eventually convinced Tiffany, that we should raise sheep as a source of income as well as meat for us and others. How hard could it be? I see large flocks of sheep in large pastures by themselves, smaller flocks in smaller pastures… Sheep and goats are everywhere. I’ll get to that strangeness another time. At this point after taking with people and seeing how the sheep are managed, I figured this should be easy.

I read several books cover to cover. I took a few online classes. I watched countless videos online of people talking about how they raise their sheep. Tiffany has gone to the salebarn and watched the activities there. Ok. Maybe it’s not that easy. But it should be manageable, and fun. Sheep are adorable, right?

Ever since we moved here, I said we can’t start a new enterprise without the infrastructure. We need water plumbed around the property. We need new fences. We need some cross fencing. We’ll get all of this put together, and then we will get started… Hasn’t happened once. The one infrastructure that I managed to get done before I got laid off was installing a cattleguard at our gate. Of course, it is now completely full of gravel that has run down the driveway during the many storms we have had in the last four years.

The poultry still has no pen. Ultimately, I have let that go because we only need a pen less than three months out of the year. When the predators have their young in the spring they go hunting very aggressively. We have a bit of a handle on that, and frankly, when we have enough chickens and guineas, the tick population around the house goes down almost to zero. That’s my excuse for failing to finish that infrastructure, and I’m sticking to it. Oh yeah. I fill a lot of water reservoirs for said poultry… all year round… more when it is below zero outside.

The pigs did not start much differently. There were many issues coming up with our first Berkshires, and the message that a pair had been identified and were ready for us happened unexpectedly. Yeah, it was three months later than we had originally planned, and one could suppose that I’d have the Taj Mahal of a pig-management system by then. However, as it kept getting postponed, I worked on other projects (like the garden) thinking that there was an ever increasing probability that we were not going to get any pigs that Spring. So, when the call came in, I had to move. Fortunately, I had virtually everything I needed. I at least put some of my plan in action through acquiring the tools and supplies necessary. Unfortunately, I never had the pens for rotation ready before it was time to move them to a new are of exploration. That made the pens get seriously over worked by the pigs. I do not think it hurt them, though. The only issue that may have increased due to prolonged exposure in one pen was the occasional outbreak of lice. Ivermectin, the miracle drug, took care of that. It had the added benefit of killing ticks, as well.

We were not going to make this mistake with sheep. We needed a place to keep them. We need fencing to protect them from all the crap dogs around here and protect them from the other amazingly productive livestock around these parts: coyotes. Ok. Not exactly livestock for anyone other than our neighbor who is a trapper. At any rate, we needed water out there, a place for them to escape the rain and sun when they needed, mineral stations, creep feeders… It was going to take a while.

One phone call on November 2, 2025 threw that all out the window. The neighbors had an attack by that last group of livestock I just described and a ewe and all but one of her lambs were killed. Yeah. We took her. How hard could it be… with no infrastructure and no experience. That said, I advocated for this as a learning experience. We would raise her to about 80 pounds, and then she would go to a freezer camp. Did you laugh at me? Everyone else did. Everyone looked at me and said, “you’ll never be able to butcher her.” I scoffed because I’m married to a ruthless killer. However, it is clear that neither of us our capable of it with Maple. In fact, we went with my backup idea: get a ram and we can breed her. We can eat her kids if we are not as attached. So, now we will look at it as serendipity that on January 31st, we got a second call, which was immediately followed by little ram Yeager joining our experiment of sheep-raising with no infrastructure. In the picture above they were both laying on the porch by the door almost sleeping; maybe occasionally chewing the cud. When I tried to take the first picture, Yeager jumped up to see what games we must be about to play, and Maple tried to decide if it was worth it to stand up and ruin a good cud.

Well. I will never stop learning, and I have already learned enough from these two to boost my confidence that we can do this even though the infrastructure in my head might never come to fruition. However, the plan we started with absolutely must change. Raising two lambs in our house has been quite the adventure.