The last few weeks have been very busy & filled with a lot of travel. I’ll be honest, for a long time me leaving the farm usually meant some type of flock catastrophe. Overtime I began to consciously work towards creating a flock that ‘could roll with life’ when I needed it to. The road to this goal had some bumps & truthfully I wasn’t confident enough to test the flock for more than a week or so. Until this summer….
It’s been a summer of weddings I couldn’t miss, reunions I would have regretted not being a part of & trips to help my young adult children settle into new schools & jobs. It was also a summer of severe heat & strained pasture rotations. A few years ago I think it may have resembled an apocalypse!
I returned home today after another 7+ day absence (where I have that vague feeling of when you leave a toddler with a teenager to go on a date with your husband? That necessary but also crazy feeling?!)
My neighbor farm sits & is priceless, but knows nothing about sheep other than giving a little hay & checking waters. I try to set out enough minerals (while whispering a silent plea to the universe) & that’s about it.
Yet somehow, against all odds, this has been the best summer ever… with 77 sheep in the pasture. Other than an unfortunate accident that took the life of one lamb, we’ve been blessed with good health. I’m not one to take this for granted & instead immediately began flipping through my years of data while sitting in the pasture on a cool September evening.
I feel like so many things were ‘wrong’ this year, but yet everyone (except one lamb who got into the chicken feed on a 100 degree day) is still with us. What is different? My notes show a couple of accommodations I was forced to make to overcome the drought & the resulting slow pasture growth. I zeroed in on those & they led to the silvopasture:woods.
A new shepherd paraphrased something to me recently that she had read.
“Pasture is their nutrition & the woods are their medicine”.
YES! I’ve found this to be so true & like so much of life it was a hardship that tested & confirmed my suspicions. The drought in June was so bad that I had to utilize more silvopasture. 2-3 acres that looked like a tangle of shrubs, saplings & weeds under massive oak trees. It didn’t look like much, but it was cooler.
I’ve always credited our oaks to keeping the sheep healthy, but their time below them use to constitute 20% of the period from May-Oct. This summer it has been 40-50%. Currently, as I sit here writing this, I find them picking up the acorns off the ground. I’ve grown accustomed to the crunch of their chewing. When a branch comes crashing down we don’t waste it. They will strip it of every leaf.
The comments I always get are: aren’t oak tannins poisonous to livestock?
I’m going to include two links to answer this question. One of the links is a warning. The other is a study where lambs with a higher parasite load purposely consume a higher tannin diet. YES! That’s exactly what I’m seeing. I aim to chemically deworm less than 15% of my lamb crop. I have achieved this in the last couple years, but that’s been with excellent pasture rotation. This year I expected to stumble due to slow growing pastures & sluggish rotation, but we’re holding at that same percentage. It makes me ask, how?
I have seen the flock select to eat the free choice raw garlic when they need it, but I hadn’t thought of how they may use the oak tannins when they need them the most. I’ve seeded birdsfoot trefoil & chicory in my pastures (it grows along the roads here so it’s been an easy addition). I notice that they have selected to eat much of it when just a month ago it seemed the yellow & purple blooms were everywhere. My guess is that they’re self-medicating, but here are the university experts.
The cautionary link.
The tannin diet study link.
If you’re like me this is will frustrate you because on one hand you have a warning that it’s poisonous & on the other it’s beneficiary.
Can they both be right? I think so.
My experience is that animals will seldom chose to consume a poisonous plant. This requires there to be plenty of other edible & palatable options. I also feel it requires the animal to the fit the environment. Would I have felt as confident with the market Suffolks I raised growing up, as I do with Icelandics who have a millennium of foraging history? Most likely not. Foragers, whether they be goats, wild pony breeds or Icelandic sheep will always have an advantage on avoiding poisonous plants.
Lastly, I feel animals with good body scores & proper mineral balances are able to ‘read’ their bodies’ signals better. A healthy sheep will always know how to use plant diversity to aid its health better than a sheep that is struggling or deficient.
If you’re like me, you’ll need to read a lot more articles to better understand if tannins are right for your flock, but I hope I opened a discussion that will lead you to incorporating more biodiversity in your program. My experience is that the woods & the plant life it has to offer can truly be restorative for a flock. I’m determined to keep learning on how to be a good steward of this resource & to better understand how plants are providing support.
What began as a terrible drought has delivered an exciting new realm of possibilities. I know we’re bombarded by different opinions & methods all the time, but I encourage everyone to take the time to figure out how your flock’s diet is effecting their performance. Icelandic sheep are extremely stoic & hardy. They are capable of thriving in diverse conditions IF you can figure out how to support them nutritionally (this includes minerals & vitamins).
I wish everyone the best with shearing & processing. As the evenings get cooler, the upcoming breeding season grows closer. Hopefully I’ll find time to post some of the pairings. We’ll definitely have Whitman, Huckleberry & Lamborghini in the line up, plus 1-2 more live cover as well as our first season of VAI using straws from Iceland. It should be a good adventure!
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