 Mostly the slides in my short from a while ago on our other farm we just moved in October so I really don't have a whole lot of pictures of this farm but everything we were doing there we're gonna do down here we're gonna look at it a little differently when we moved to this farm my husband and I were 30 and we had babies now we're in our mid-40s and we have teenagers and they're planning on having their own lives soon so we're kind of looking at doing things so that it's manly for us as we get older which is kind of weird for us to think about but so some of these pictures are winter pictures because the last time I did a presentation with these it was winter so I'm sorry I bring winter back this is kind of a shot of what our sheep look like we have two main kinds of sheep cormos which are the kind of the white faces and we also have blue-faced lesters which we have this is a blue-faced lester we're starting to cross these blue-faced lesters with the tees water and Wensley Dale they're all British breed long wool breeds they make long curly fleece you think about the lambs you see at the fair they have a very what's called a Downey wool so it's a kind of a shorter real spring these is have long curly wool they all come from Great Britain area UK they're all part of their crossbreeding screen scheme there these would be considered cider breeds over there here they're considered a wool breed the cornrows are a fine wool breed sort of like a merino if you ever hear about that if you look on sweaters and that they're often advertised as merino so it's a really fine wool breed but our goal for a long time was this we were gonna raise the best fine wool there was in the Midwest and we did do that for a long time we now kind of are changing our focus this still still want to have the best wool out there but we're kind of changing that we'll talk about that later so then this is kind of how this is the environment part of the sustainable agriculture in here we use a lot of intensive grazing we do outwintering we expect these animals to harvest their own feed to spread their own manure we're probably not quite as hardcore about it as we once were that kind of goes back to us looking at how we're going to do things over the long haul and also did you see here we were in the flat area before now everything we have is on a hillside and getting hay out to them in the winter isn't going to be as easy as it once was so we probably will not be outwintering quite as much or probably more a lot in the winter just for easy feeding as you see this is what it looks like early spring where we would have fed the sheep at this time we probably had about 70 years and we would just go out there and we feed them and we would spread the hay right on the ground we didn't use hay feeders everything goes out there so everything is spread out so what do you think happens in that spot you've got about a foot of hay left there it's like a big mulch and everything underneath there grows at tons of worms tons of fertilizer and that spot will look kind of like that all year but the next year that's going to be the greenest spot on the farm and we didn't have to do anything or buy anything other than the hay there this is kind of an interesting picture and this was late winter the picture on the left shows our farm and the picture on the right is the field directly across from us probably a little later but everything in our place is covered in grass and of course that's all tilled it's always beans and corn so you see how much more isolating we're getting how much more we're able to protect our soil in the microbes and everything they're like yeah these are pictures kind of taken for the presentation right again this spring I once when we did lamb and pasture we just about April use went out everybody had their babies on pasture I don't do that anymore I liked it during the day I hated it at night and I probably didn't have to go check on the girls at night but it's just part of my nature to have to be out there something's happening so I didn't didn't like that that we did lay them on there now we kind of do a lot we'll be doing more modified again we'll be lambing on the hay pack where they overwintered again we rotational graze so that means our sheep move every single day we only give them as much grass as they can eat in a day and then they move we control them with my kid this is an electrified that all our perimeter fences are five wire high tensile we've put in an 80 juburn 20 joule low impedance sensor on there which means if they touch that sucker you hear it across the whole farm and we need that because that net draws a ton of juice and it also shorts out pretty easy the lambs of course this year they're not but we won't talk about this year it is kind of a mess the lambs will move with their mothers all summer I'm grass the corals aren't exactly the known for real rapid gains so by the time we pull them in this fall they're 50 60 pounds and depending on how much grass we have left either they'll go back they'll have their own pasture or we'll just sell them as feeders at that point because they're moving every day we would haul water this is what we like our pasture to go it look like when we go in we're a firm believer in grazing tall a lot of grazing literatures above you know you go in at this high you take it down to this and then you move on we wanted this we let them take whatever they want and then they move there's a couple reasons why that works for us one this farm in particular was really really really bad it was tired and when we were trying to low grazing that the ground never got covered so it was always baked so we had no microbes we had no no dung beetles we had no worms it was just baked brown very little cover when we finally figured out to start going in taller things changed really rapidly another reason why we you know that keeps the ground covered it keeps it shaded it's cooler another reason why we like this it's cheaper really susceptible to parasites especially if you're in a grazing situation by letting them just take the leaves that want off the top of the plants we really avoided a lot of our parasite issues so once we take the sheep and this is pretty much what it looked like when they come back out I think that's it come out yeah so we go in and then they come out looking like that we see that he had cattle on there and take his own sound but she just aren't big enough to do that again here you can see they take all that leaves off the stalks they flatten it out and people might get a little worried that you're leaving a lot of stuff out there on the pasture but we found that our games really increased once we started doing this and the sheep were generally healthier they the the pasture the soil is healthier so other than Canadian thistle another real benefit we had is huge amount of wildlife on our place but we had everything I mean we had coyotes we had bears but because of that we also had some gargoyles we found that they work better in pairs a lot of the logic of the llama says one but we really thought they were better in pairs this is shows in the fall we easily we easily graze come in December not later depending on the grass by the time the lambs are off but we couldn't actually use it terrible stuff just let eat it off there we had a few cows this shows that same area once they're done probably kept this was a low swampy area so moving them in there for a while because it wasn't easy to buy it up you raised cattle a little cheaper and one time we had when we first moved there we hadn't heard of cattle now we just have a cow and we keep her so that we have our own beef right now in our place we probably are gonna try and bring our cow numbers back up a little bit to help with pasture management because with moving we cut our flock way back so we do well this next set of pictures is what what shearing days kind of like for us you see they are sheep all the pictures were coats just like this in nylon coat they wear it from shearing to shearing separate long holes like with new faces they'll get their coat in the fall and it's gonna be circled okay here's a bunch of girls they've got their coats off they're waiting for shearing to see how clean they are here's our shearer he could shear one of those sheep in about five minutes this after everyone is shorn every fleece is taken and thrown out on a table like this every year I have my mom and my aunt come they help me they take all the manure in the dirty parts off the fleece and then each fleece is individually rolled and put them to a plastic bag and then we later we'll go back over every fleece and do it's called spurting over it again where we'll take out anything dirty and then have it ready for our consumers so we sell a lot of our fleece raw right now we get anywhere from 20 to 30 dollars pound raw for that fleece and that's each one of you will give us about four to five pounds that is under the coat that we can sell at that price just to give you a perspective right now I think the going rate on finals what 60 is it is it down now it's down so dollar 20 that's that's it yeah we're just sending it we were hauling it to Duane's house just go into the local that's what we get for it we also take all other wool or our skirted wool I send it to a place in Michigan they will do what's called combing which is ready for anybody who would like to hand spin it or I use it to make my felted items which is the next step we also take the fleece off the lawn wools the blue face lesters the ones that he's water switch this is kind of dirty wash it we'll die it people will buy this like crazy Tyler's my official lock dire said in this with we have our own well don't have a place set up yet but we've always had facilities where we wash and die our own wool people will buy as little handfuls of this so all kinds of crafts I need a lot of different things do you use commercial dye or do you that's probably the most frequent question is so what kind of dye use everybody wants you to use the natural plant dyes and then you get the blood out colors but you know to get ready to get red but that's a very expensive round up bug die and to me it was the difference if I'm working ground up bugs from Mexico or buying up a chemical dye and technically how you use them there but people want you to do that they don't care if you're organic grass-fed wool or anything that they want you to be using natural dyes but I really know we also have a little process I use this in my felting so then we I can go to the next step and I do felt it they've ever heard of water same concept I'll take the fibers like this and then I make things like that if you want meccuses vessels purses pretty much anything so that's an example of different things I've made out of our wool I feel like a really grand mode so economic end of it if you want to talk about that and the money end of it we do okay we're not making a ton of money but we are making more than you know commercial prices we started out with I think at the most we probably had about 70 years at one time with the move and the boys doing their own thing and that we've cut back quite a bit and I think right now I'm gonna stay at the lower numbers and just more intensely market the products from fewer as opposed to more I think in the end of it's all better with fewer animals and what I know is for marketing we go to sheep and wool festivals there's a little festival down in Jefferson it's a pretty large one for several years we did Shepherd's Harvest which is a festival by the Twin Cities just one in Iowa we go into Michigan the one thing about the festivals is I like them but I'm also not someone who really thrives off of being with people that much all the time so I used to have a website but I also found the pressure keeping up a website was too much so I don't just rely on Facebook and Instagram and that's sort of stuff and I have repeat customers that do they want the same fleece here after year from the same sheep I never guarantee that okay too many variables yeah I could have called her you know she could had some bad experience and we had a break in that fleece or the code could have come off and all of a sudden the fleece isn't you know that goes into the process so I never ever do that I know some people that do market that way but I find it too risky I don't want to explain calling because a lot of my customers don't get that they don't want to get that every sheep of ours has a name because they don't they want to buy fleeces with names they don't want to buy fleeces with a number I'm starting to pull names back from way back and when we had a lot a lot of sheep got named on shearing day and it will interest like everybody else said everybody wants their fleece to have a story just as much as they want their lamb chop to have the story we do sell some breeding stock but I find that's not the most fun either so I don't I avoid that actually any other questions for Joe thank you