 The daily of our farm is lamb log acres. My husband kind of came up with the name. We each have a different version of the name. I like the history of Camelot. This kind of fit in for me. And I look at it, we have lots of lambs. So we each have a different version, but it works. We have two kids. Desiree is a little bit older picture. Desiree just finished her junior year at Winona State. She's going to be a teacher. And Dylan is a senior this year in high school and is going to graduate here in a week. And that's for any of our dog. Desiree came on a trailer that his wife told him, no, we don't want this dog. And she came off the trailer with the sheep. These are some old photos just because I'm not very prepared like Jill is. And so we also do graze. This is a very old picture. We've now added on to that shed, doubled it in size. Got rid of that little one with the bad roof there. Recently, two years ago, we bought expanded our flock and bought some Western use. Personally, we would not recommend that to anyone. They have taught us a lot of some things we don't want to know. And we rotational grazed with the Electronet. We now do a whole paddock at a time because they don't pay particular fondness to our fencing. The rotation grazing is awesome. I mean, if you can do it, that is the best way. Like Jill was saying, for the environment, for the animals health-wise, it's awesome. But you've got to train your animals for that type of system. And like the animal was saying, with the Electronet, we probably didn't move them as often or did not give them enough area to graze. So ours weren't trained, and they would try and stick their head through the Electronet. And sometimes they got their head back out. Sometimes they go forward. Sometimes they flip and spin. And if you have lambs out there, it's typically what happened. And the outcome's not real positive. So we shied away from that. And like Dan was saying, we've got our pasture in quarters. And we do have two other areas that they can graze. And we've only got six paddocks that we can graze at home. We do have other pasture that we do rent. So we try and rotate them as well. But the intensive grazing, there's an art to it. There's an art to it. It did. But if you only have your wire about this high, and if the animals aren't used to it, they go right over. We did really good with our flock. But these Western use are totally different. They don't stop for a person. They plow through you. And so they would plow. But most of them would jump over. Anyway, we had to modify our program to incorporate this. This was a picture just yesterday. We let some mom and babies out on grass. We were going to weed them and decided that we'd save a little bit on peat costs. So this group of lambs we let go out on pasture and that's typically not our protocol. Normally we wean the lambs with our direct marketing so we can put them through the system a little bit faster. So normally just the user out on pasture. With the grazing also, with intensive grazing, we found that lambs were a problem on pasture for us. So we hand feed them their grain mix. We don't add any antibiotics and hormones or kind of our big things in their feed. And then we harvest the hay and bring it to them. This is one of our other pastures. There's a pond right across our road, which is really great for this one. They have free access to water. It's a natural spring fed pond. So they have a spring on the other end that they can drink off of. Otherwise we also bring water to them like Jill does with the water tank and the other pastures. There was Jill coming there about a while back in the other server's case on the pond. There's five gosselings with that pair right now. And I seen a fox the other morning when I was doing chores. And the coyote's from Indiana was moving the lecternette a couple years ago. The machine got started running away and she's like, okay, what's going on? The coyote was going right to the pasture and that's where they were. And there we had donkeys and fawns, right? This was, I would say, one of our better investments on the farm. Quite a few years ago, we put in a fence line feeder when you have the number of sheep that we have. We don't have a place to lock them out when we feed. And so this works really great. We're going to have plow it over as you're feeding. And so we have the left-hand side that are used that are left to the lamb here yet. On the right-hand side, we're girls that were weaned already and we're waiting to move them to a neighbor's pasture. That's Dwayne at work. That's the iron hill. I told Dwayne, why don't you take a picture of our jugs? And so these were kind of interesting pictures I appeared. We have an old horse barn. It really was a horse barn and my grandparents' barn. We live on my grandparents' farm. But now that we're lambing at this time of year, we're actually lambing down on the shed. We're going to have a little bit more room, but we're kind of making some of our portable jugs so we can move anywhere. And so what we like to do is at least put them in a, we call those a jug pen for 24 hours if we have that amount of time. Ideally, and Jill maybe does this too, but we found the bonding. You want to have the babies bond with the mothers because if they don't and you put them in a group environment, they may or may not find each other after that. So we want to try to have the lambs bond with the mothers and then we'll put them in a group panel. Currently, they're not getting 24 hours or something. Right. We found that works best for us. What's lambing right now? That was an honor. I guess I cut off part of the picture. But Duane took a picture. This was a set of triplets. And I'm sorry, I cut one of them. There's a lot of the picture. Yeah. We also, we're going to get into that a little bit, but we direct market our meat. We told you that or you heard about that already, but we strictly started off with lamb. But after we got the market a few years, our kids were in 4-H and started diversifying with their livestock. And so we started diversifying with our meat. Duane raised pigs when he grew up. And so this is, again, I cut off the picture putting it on here just now. But this is one of our batches that we're trying to weeding at the moment. Last night, we took the sow out, but she decided to get back into the barn. So we don't let her back in these days. This is kind of the start of a little series. Again, I didn't do a very good job getting pictures ready ahead of time, but we had a meat opportunity. Eau Claire Energy Cooperative put in a solar field in Eau Claire. And they were looking for a lamb producer to graze the solar field so that they wouldn't have to mow grass and keep it a green project. So we asked our son if he was interested. And he thought he would be interested. And so this was him. He started out, we started with 10 first and 15 lambs. Really not knowing it's a very sandy ground, not knowing how much support, just leaving them for there for the summer. Once we got those 15 up there, we quickly decided we better bring another 10. So this was just him bringing them out. And I didn't take any pictures, but both kids raised beef steer and that was the other product that we marketed, a beef product to the field. And all you're seeing is the eyes there at the moment. They're black steers, so that's why you're seeing those eyes. This was him with those in the trailer. And I guess I got them out of order here. This one here, we direct market the farmer's market. And this is kind of my setup. It's kind of expanded here. But we also market a neighbor's honey. When I started the market, nobody else had honey. And since he put some of his hives in our land, they let us bring that also. And we have beef and we do some pasture chicken. And then of course our lamb. You wanna go back one? This one, one thing that I wanted to touch base on when we started, we only had lamb. And so when you only have lamb, we tried to be creative of what products you could make out of lamb. So we first started with brats and tried an all lamb brat and they're delicious. And you'd be surprised the amount of people that are willing to try a lamb brat just because it's something different. But I used to be a big lover of Johnsonville brats. And once we made our own brats, you realize how much fat it is in a Johnsonville brat. And so they've been a really great seller and it also helps us get rid of some of our trim, which we don't have any problem with because of that reason. Another thing was Euromeat. Typically, I guess it is normally a beef and lamb mixture. Ours is 100% lamb. It's another thing, it's a fast food item for us. It's already pre-cooked. All they have to do is warm it up. And so that product has been a great seller too. And then we just tried to come up with lots of different products out of the leg. Different versions, because not everybody can use a whole leg of lamb at a time. So we do leg steaks, we do stir fry strips. Sometimes we do kebab chunks out of those. This is a picture at the solar field and Dylan actually got involved with the Youth and Masters program that the Co-op Energy has. And he was showing the other youth masters the sheet. Most of the kids involved with Youth and Masters program are from Eau Claire. So they don't have a whole lot of experience with agriculture. So this is an opportunity for Dylan to help educate some city kids on their project. They're just handling children, all soft, they can be at least. And it is secured. This can involve both Dylan and I, and us, I should say. American Lamb Board, they offered value-added grants. And we applied our Indian Head Sheep and Goat Readers Association to apply for grant. And we were awarded grant. And with that money, Deanna and I put on a food demo at the downtown farmers market. And we contacted one of her chefs, the guy, or guy Logan, from Hooligan State and Seafood in Eau Claire, came and did a lamb demonstration with meatballs, we did the 300 servings. She's just handing out different samples to people. And it's surprising, Deanna, she's there every week, I'm not. It's a surprise a lot of people haven't had lamb before, and maybe some youth folks haven't either. The older generation has a stigma that they might. That's what our grandfathers were served during the war. And if it's not prepared correctly, it's gonna be a little tough. And that's not a real positive experience for people. The younger generation now is experiencing and more open-minded. Deanna commented about the year-old strips. You see that in different restaurants now, that year-olds are served the bratwurst. There's a lot of different ways of preparing and offering lamb to consumers. And we're trying to acknowledge that, and trying to get lamb out to the legitimate public more. Just an interesting side note, less than a pound of lamb's consumed per capita in the United States versus 60 pounds of pork. And chicken is higher. Yes, ma'am. Where do you guys process your lamb's? The lamb's. Gunners and foods in Mandovi. And then our customers in Minnesota that mark it up in the Twin Cities, they have a federally inspected plant in the older Minnesota and they are currently building their own processing facility that would be located in Dover. Sort of right off of the end of the day. We do have some products processed at Falls Meads to do a couple of products, but all the processing usually is done at Mandovi. That's one of the hard things when you direct market is the processing cost is very high on lamb. So because of the number of lamb's that we do, we've been able to work out a little bit of a deal with our processor, but most people don't get that because they're not putting through the number of animals. But yeah, the processing cost is a lot. So. Do you ever mix any of the other, like do you ever mix the lamb with any other product? It's always just strictly lamb. Yeah. I think the biggest thing is we start out with that way and people like it that way. And so, and we really haven't had any problem with the pork. We just try and cover the products within that species. It's really hard. Part of the hard part about direct marketing when you're doing all the different cuts is trying not to end up with more of one product than the other product. So we've had to come creative or work with some of our restaurants to say, I'm long on this. So you take this product at this time or whatnot. One thing about direct marketing, and this is Jill's presentation to, her product is very presentable, very nice. And if we were looking at a processor to do our lambs and our pork, if they're packaging, if they don't do a good seal and you have leakers, that's not gonna work. And if we're selling to our actual food stores, they're gonna put it on a shelf and display that. So there's gonna be how many customers walking by and if they don't see a desirable product in that freezer, that's not gonna work real well for us. So the processor that you're working with has to have a presentable, very professional product. They have to be consistent. We've run into that. We had our main processor was in Augusta and they had a fire. And we went several different places and we just, you can't, if you're direct marketing people, you can't have an inconsistent product from your processor. It just doesn't work that way. You're apologizing all the time and it's not your fault. So, we try and do some different things. We had a big preschool in Eau Claire had contacted us when we first moved to our farm. And every so many years, they ask us to come and visit the farm. This last year, the weather did not permit because you really don't want people coming when it's mud. And so we ended up actually going to them this last year. And so the biggest thing I think that we wanna say is that just like if you're at the fair, you know that you need to put on a good show, be, have your animals presentable because the public that knows nothing about animals, that's maybe the only view they're getting and you need to educate them. And so, you know, the big thing is with the farmer's market, I always have recipes there for the lamb. And you're surprised how many people will try it if they have a recipe because it's all very different. And so this was just another way that we have done something with the community. And the last ones I threw in were just kind of when we were first getting started in 4-H. This was Lilo, my daughter's first new lamb and she's still on the farm today. She usually can't raise all of her lambs anymore, but she will probably die on our farm. And the next one was both kids showing up at the fair. I believe it was Desiree's block, probably a time, maybe. And that was our daughter's last time at the fair. Any questions? Your pastures, is that a grass legume mix, or is it? Jill can help on this one too. You want some legumes in there. We want legumes in there. For two reasons, you're going to increase the production of the grass because the nitrogen that you're offering to the grass and you're gonna get a better gain for your animals consuming it because it's higher protein in your legumes. And do you know sheep like the leafy plants? Better than the grass? Of course, you'll go in, clear out anything that's a leaf like clover, standalines, and all that before they'll start eating grass. One thing, when we lived in Desiree, we actually had some cows too. And it worked out really nice for us when we were rotating our pastures down there. We'd put the cows in after the sheep because in Jill's slide earlier, the tall grass, the stems were just there. The cows would come in and clear that up. So if you were to have a manning you pasture, or if you want to remove any parasites that could be still in the grasses, the cows will consume those. And those worms do not cross transfer to the sheep. So multiple species grazing can come from it. Any other questions? Thank you very much.