June 7, 2025: Here's the Scoop

Your (sometimes) weekly digest of all the farm happenin's

Hey friend!

Just wanting to send you some quick farm updates on what’s been keeping us busy this last week/weekend.

---

Goats

• MILKING: We are in full on milking season, but we only milk once per day (up at 4:45am to be out milking at 5am). This article does a great job explaining how we do that

• KID-SHARE: In order to get milk in the morning, we “kid-share” starting at 4-6 weeks of age which just means that we lock up the baby goats the night before so that their mommas will have some milk first thing in the morning.

  • Then at around 5:30-6am once milking is over, the babies are reunited with their mommas and everyone is happy until it’s time for baby goat lockup again in the evening!

Here is a glimpse of what Baby Goat Lockup looks like - we lovingly also refer to it as Baby Goat Vortex when we get swarmed :)

---

Sheep

• UPDATE: the sheep are doing great, as always! We have such a wonderful batch of lambs this season that we’ll be sad to see them go in July.

• WEANING: will happen next week! So we’ll see if Baby Lamb Vortex becomes a thing 😂

• PROJECT: we’re currently mapping out making a runway for the Ewes and retained lambs to get from their permanent pen, out to the pasture with the cows.

We fell in love with American Blackbelly sheep BEFORE we had our first batch of lambs - now we’re in with this breed for life 🥰

---

Cattle

• PASTURES: Our cattle are currently split between 2 locations:

  • CALVES: Our yearlings are less than 10 minutes away at our new friend Randy’s pasture for the summer (we think he’s really starting to like them!)

  • COWS: The 2025 Cow/Calf pairs are here at home in our small pasture; only 1 calf has been born so far, the other 2 are due early July

We’ve got 6 calves at Randy’s pasture and last went for a visit a few days ago to get some updated photos.

L to R: Georgia, baby Annabelle, momma Bluebelle, and Mabel

---

Penners

• NEW PURCHASE: Our most exciting news (well, to us anyway) is that we finally decided to purchase a round baler so we woudn’t have to bale 1,000(ish) squares every summer anymore

• HAY SEASON: We had our first opportunity to bale rounds last week with our Alfalfa field to open up our 2025 Hay season and it was a total success!

  • There is a little bit of a learning curve for Jeff moving from squares to rounds, but he’s a quick learner and I (Lorraine) am personally grateful that I did not have to lift a SINGLE finger for this first field (and hopefully all future fields this summer and beyond)

Everyone meet Bail (Organa) with the assist from an old Allis-Chalmers. He’s no Senator, but gosh I already love him!

The smell of alfalfa has never been as good as when it’s baled in rounds instead of squares.

That’s it for this week’s update.

See you next time!