Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Snorri snogging




I forgot to mention that Snorri the Rental Ram arrived on Sunday. This is an old picture, from last year. Snorri is the big one with the white spot on his nose.

He has a very wrinkly nose too, which is kind of cute.

He got right down to business, licking around Nellie, a recently mature ewe. Nellie, for her part, was not impressed, and ran away.

Named for the first European child born in North America (around 1,000 AD to a woman who traveled with Lief Erikson), Snorri was the first-born lamb of the Beach family farm, over by Farmington, Maine. (His owners had visited Lief's former camp in Newfoundland.)

We like him because he's so mellow. His lambs are also very mellow, and add calm to our flock, which can be collectively scatterbrained at times. He's also quite large as Romney-cross studs go, adding around 10 lbs to the weight of a finished fat lamb after five months.

Which is good, because we pay his stud fee in meat. Depending on our luck with lambing and lambs, we will get from two to three, to five to six times the weight back at the end of the process, as we pay up front.

So the fat lamb we sold this year from Snorri weighed 45 dressed, while the three from Abraram weighed around 35.

While Abraram is also mean, and once almost broke Aimee's arm when she made the mistake of reaching through a gate to get a feed dish. He did manage to break the gate, which was made of seasoned hardwood, so she was lucky to get away with a bruise.

I suggested to her that we she make ram-burger of Abraram, and keep Snorri full-time.

(We are not supposed to do this, as we are bound by a promise we made to the former owners of our flock not to slaughter the original members, of which Abe is one. But that was before Abe was so mean. If he's going to hurt us and be mean, we shouldn't have to keep him, says I.)

She just gave me that look. But Abe is a useless mouth right now, and mean. Maybe I should post a Google-blogger poll and see what the blog visitors say?

Thumbs up or down for Abe? Vote to your left.

Ain't democracy wonderful?

1 comment:

  1. If I may ... Promises or not, there is only one place for mean animals on the farm - freezer. Using them for breeding is asking for problems in the future. It's a safety issue, so there is really no place for a debate. I mean, despite your promise you'd butcher him if he was badly hurt and it would be OK, right? Same idea. Between tractors, snakes, clueless visitors, trees, etc. an average farm is dangerous enough, thank you very much ... (I know you know all this - just to give you some more ammo hopefully :)

    Just out of curiosity - how many pounds was the stud fee?

    Also, in one of your previous posts you discussed selling meat - I understand that it's not your goal to get top price but may be you know what's the average price up there? Someone told me that lamb goes for about $4 live weight in Ohio and that made me wonder - it's about $2 around here (FL).

    Also - didn't comment on your pigs loading post but it was hilarious, thanks!

    ReplyDelete

Welcome to our Farm Blog.
The purpose of this blog is for Aimee and I to communicate with friends and family, with those of our students, and other folks in general who are interested in homesteading and farming activities.

The earliest posts, at the very end of the blog, tell the story of the Great Farm, our purchase of a fragment of that farm, the renovation of the homestead and its populating with people and animals. Go all the way to the last post in the archive and read backwards from there to get it in chronological order.

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