I will admit I didn’t have the funds or the time to get the correct infrastructure under my mother to make kidding and lambing season work correctly. I flat ran out of money, it happens in farming, you look at everything that needs to be done and without fail you will have an emergency. We had several, I put out the call to my siblings and they dropped what they could and helped. We circled the wagons from several states and the week that we were to start kidding my youngest sister and her husband came into the farm and built the Nanny Sheds. This saved our season; they got the first shed up just in time to welcome the first kid to the farm. Now these two live 6 hours away and farm their own farm. The only question they ever asked was where we put the lumber and is this where you want the shed. The very next weekend they could find someone to cover their farm they were back to help mom get the second shed constructed.
Goats can be very fickle creatures, they like to be warm, with winter was any but warm, these sheds sheltered the kids from the wind, rain, snow and bitterly cold temperatures. Now why do I say that our family and friends are the best… well the only barn on this homestead was filled with I would safely say 50 plus years of junk from the former owners. My parents, siblings, and certain friends tackled the old barn cleaning and clearing out all sorts of things to make it safe to shelter animals. I came home from Texas the week of Christmas to finish cleaning out the sheds and repairing the driveways of the barn right before the snowstorm. We put sheep and goats in the barn just mere hours before the wind started blowing. While we were doing this, we were also creating outside shelters for the animals we couldn’t fit in the barn. If you think you prepared for a winter storm, I want you to take your hardest day and multiply it by 100. While all this was going on, we were also positioning hay, bringing in extra feed, moving cattle to shelter, creating wind blocks, moving trucks, and equipment so we could get out to take care of livestock as soon as possible.
While one group was cleaning and preparing the barn another group of us were creating a temporary shelter for the other animals. This was something new for us as we have always had the barns to move all livestock under shelter. We had to rethink what we knew about weather history on this farm and what we knew about how storms have historically blown into the area as we have never wintered animals in this area/side of the farm. We ended up creating the shelter out of gates and livestock panels that we put a tarp over and tied off multiple places with ropes and strings. We then created an additional wind break with multiple round bales. The reasoning for steps like this is if you can get any animal out of the wind the chances of them making it thru extreme cold, wind and snow goes up significantly. Depending on the condition of the animals they will generate the body heat they need if you keep them out of the wind. Getting them under cover you are doing even better, then you feed the heck out of them to ensure they can keep their core temp up.
As I circle back around to the point, this Kidding season could have been an epic disaster, it damn near was, there were several heartbreaking moments that made us question why we attempted this kidding and lambing season. But there were great moments too; watching kids bounce across the sheds and barn makes you think yep, this is why we do what we do. I can’t express my gratitude to those that stood by our sides through the last year and gave us the courage to keep moving forward. Those that helped pick us up in some of our darker hours, those that held things for us when we couldn’t get there due to something else blowing up in our face. Those that moved their schedules to help us and those that picked up the phone and called to offer help and advice, Thank you. Customers that continued to come to markets and support us and offer support, listened, laughed and cried with us at times, I am forever grateful and know you are the ones that give a damn and you are the ones I want to know.