Work

I realized I may not have properly described what I’ve actually been doing one this New Zealand farm for the past two weeks. It’s partly because there has been a lot of rain lately making it too difficult to do the much needed jobs.

I’ve been doing little jobs a lot, like collecting firewood, power washing, and feeding the hand reared calves and lambs in the paddock behind the house. The real work I’ve been here to do and have done occasionally is to collect, feed and stock the chicken pens and dock the llambs.

Every day the 600 chickens they have lay about 450 eggs, which all need to be collected and sorted. Here are the steps:

1. Take the car and put ten full buckets of feed, wood shavings, six collecting bucks, oyster shells, and dirty egg cartons in it.
2. Go to chicken coup #1 and fill the back feeder up with two buckets of feed, and two handfuls of oyster shells.
3. Go in the coup and undernearth the roosting perches collecting dirty eggs.
4. Fill the nesting boxes up with wood shavings and knock out poop when there is some.
5. Go around to the side and collect eggs that have rolled out of the  nesting boxes.
6. Try not to run over chickens when driving to the next coup.
7. Repeat steps 2-6 for coups 2-5.
8. Bring all the collected eggs to the eggs shed.
9. Sort all the eggs into clean and dirty eggs.
10. Clean the dirty eggs using concentrated sodium hydroxide.
11. Put all the eggs into cartons of 30. There are usually about 14 cartons.

The other main job which I’m doing is called docking. It is pretty gruesome and took a little getting used to. It involves collecting the 2000 sheep and driving them to the wool shed, then ear marking and cutting the tails of lambs.

1.   The first step is to grab Chief the sheep dog and the two ATVs and head out into the farm.
2.    Head to the far end of the select paddocks that need mustering (herding) opening gates along the way.
3. Once at the furthest paddock start heading toward the wool shed keeping the ewes and lambs in front of you with the help of Chief.
4. Muster the sheep and lambs into the pens outside the wool shed eventually forcing them into the race way.
5.   Force about 50 animals down the raceway and help to keep them moving while Perry seperates the lambs from the ewes.
6.    Once we have about 30 lambs in a small pen Matt and I grab the lambs by their hind legs and put them into the cradle.      Perry either decides it a LT (long tail, older male), GST (genetically short tail), or normal lamb that needs to hail their tail cut off.
7.   We then ear mark each ear, one with a M (the Johnson sign) and the other with two bars.
8.    If the lamb is a smaller male Perry puts a ring around the male parts…
9.   Finally he cuts off the tail of the lamb if necessary.
10.    Repeat steps 5-10 until all ewes and lambs have been sorted and docked.
11.    Count the ewes and return them to their homes.
12.    Do this for 2000 sheep!

Those two are the main Jobs. We are almost done with those though so I should be off to my next farm soon! 

Pictures

Sooo many lambs.

Baby, maybe a week old.